


Even In the Darkest Night

by ChronicOlicity



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fix-It, Movie Spoilers, Some Greek mythology mentioned, Spoiler warning for the movie, Steve Trevor Lives, Winter Soldier AU, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-12 10:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11160210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChronicOlicity/pseuds/ChronicOlicity
Summary: "Steve?" she said.Nothing in his face changed, nothing at all. As though it didn’t matter who he was. As though it didn’t matter that she knew him. "Yes," he answered.---Winter Soldier-ish fix-it where Steve Trevor is in the 21st Century, causing trouble, and Diana has to stop him.





	1. Standing Face-to-Face

**Author's Note:**

> So I think I'm not the only one who kinda wants to see Steve alive in this century?? Or just 'alive', period.  
> If this is going in a direction you want to see, then let me know, and I'll keep going! Otherwise, this was just really fun to crank out.

**_Metropolis_ **

**_Present Day (2018)_ **

Diana was awake. The sun was rising, deep blue burning away to shades of washed yellow and fiercer red. Of course, it was nothing to the sunrises in Themyscira, thousands she'd seen, ever since she was a little girl. Always a thing of beauty, though no two were ever quite the same. Cities like Metropolis were too loud, too demanding, too bright, like something that sapped the beauty of the view the same way energy was siphoned away.

It was a waste, but waste was something Diana had accustomed herself to, after nearly a hundred years of living in the world of man. Nearly a hundred years now to the day. 1918 when she'd first come to London, first encountered war, first friendships with people other than those who’d known her all her life...

First mortal love.

First mortal loss.

Diana sat up, feeling the sun's warmth on her back. She shut her eyes, basking in it, one of the few simple things she'd learned to cherish.

_Swear to honor, love and cherish each other, until death do you part._

_And do they?_

_Not very often, no._

There. Nearly a century, and Steve's voice still had a way of making its way into her thoughts, all the things he'd said to her still as clear and sharp as the sound of a bell, withstanding the natural tarnish of time, for better or for worse.

Diana had made a point of continuing her life. She started it on her own, and she continued it, without hope or expectation of an end. One of the things she'd promised herself was not to spend it grieving. She was no one's widow, no one's sweetheart, no one except Diana Prince, and Diana, Princess of Themyscira. And truly, Steve would never have wanted her to. He'd been her guide to the human world from the start, and for all the things they'd disagreed on, she saw no reason to depart from his logic here.

But what she allowed herself was a quiet thought every now and then. A moment to pull out one of the few possessions that followed her wherever she traveled. To think of what was, what wasn't, and what might have been.

Diana crossed over to the nightstand and slid open the drawer. It shouldn’t have been necessary to give herself a reason, but she’d lived a long, long life, and having to give reasons was how she stopped herself from standing still and just remembering. All of it.

One hundred years. As good a reason as any to have a quiet thought.

The watch fit comfortably in the palm of her hand, leather strap cracked and worn with more than a century of existence, the metallic heartbeat long since stopped, frozen forever at _9:05_.

9:05 in the evening.

A mundane, meaningless series of numbers that marked the end of a life. Steve Trevor died after he gave her the watch, lost, doing exactly what he'd meant to do. Make a difference. A sacrifice. A soldier willing to die for the end of a war. A man willing to die for others, enemy or foe.

A man.

Diana put the watch gently against her cheek as she watched the sun rise over the glittering river, thinking about — and cherishing the thought — of a man braver than anyone would know, and a man she'd never forget.

"Steve," she said aloud, and felt the sound reverberate in the empty room, swirling in the morning light streaking its way across the floor and walls.

 _I love you_.

Only one of them had ever said it, and only one of them would ever hear it, but Diana knew the separation of time and space didn’t make those three words any less true for them both.

Like many other things in Diana’s present, it would just have to be enough.

* * *

Voices. Hushed footsteps, echoing off the marble floor — snow white veined with smoke gray, polished now to within an inch of its life. The faraway sound of crystal champagne glasses ringing as they were assembled for the evening’s festivities. The musicians were tuning their instruments in preparation to play; Diana could hear the soft bowing of instruments being tuned from the Red Gallery, just through the next archway.

The Metropolis History Museum was a wonder all on its own, but now it glittered like a jewel in a crown. A direct result of having been in a frenzy all week preparing for the donor’s gala, with Mr Wolfe — curator, procurer, and _de facto_ fundraiser — at the front of it.

“What do you think, Diana?” he said.

Diana thought the director (a bespectacled, soft-spoken man with a passion for Classical history), sounded nervous. Evidenced by how he’d tugged her away from her normal responsibilities in the museum’s acquisitions office, to have her look over the exhibits chosen for display that evening instead.

They were facing the latest one now, a pale marble statue of the Goddess Athena, crowned with her battle helm and dressed in flowing, graceful robes, her shield at her side and what Diana supposed must have been a spear clutched in her hand.

“I think it’s stunning,” she said, and he released a sigh of relief.

Diana smiled at him before turning back to the statue, stepping a little closer to see the _aegis_ , the shield. She didn’t lie, and Mr Wolfe knew it (her silence, _that_ was when he needed to worry). The statue _was_ stunning, the detailed craftsmanship nothing short of remarkable. Carved with the roaring head of the snake-haired Gorgon, the sculptor had etched the border of the round shield with rings of lifelike snake scales that surrounded the face in the center like a guardian ring of fire.

“Ah, I thought you might like the _aegis_ ,” said Mr Wolfe, “and her face — isn’t it lovely? The perfect balance of war and wisdom, wouldn’t you say?”

Diana looked up at the statue’s lifelike face, wondering if her sister — a fellow daughter of Zeus — would think it was a true likeness. The face was sternly beautiful, regal, and without a trace of laughter. She’d only ever seen one god in person, and knew for sure that laughter on His face was an ugly thing.

Maybe the other gods were — or would have been — different.

The director was still talking. “Based on the craftsmanship analysis and dating techniques, we think it originated sometime during the fifth century BC, most likely a relic from the Peloponnesian War, jealously guarded from enemy raiders. The Peloponnesian War, as you know —”

“Athens and Sparta,” Diana said, without taking her eyes off the statue. “Rival cities, worshiping rival patron gods.”

“Athena and Ares, yes,” Mr Wolfe said enthusiastically. She wondered if he was rehearsing his storytelling abilities for the top donors attending the gala, and whether Bruce deserved an advance warning.

Maybe not.

“A glorious time,” he said, staring rapturously at the marble statue of the goddess. “We’re lucky the only thing lost from the statue was the spear — most likely broken off for the gold leaf, the stones set in the eyes were taken too, as you can see…”

He gestured at the statue’s hand, clutching a small segment — less than a foot long — of what clearly ought to have been a full spear. Regardless of the statue’s beauty, Diana could hear Hippolyta’s chiding voice at the back of her mind. _War is not something to be desired, Diana_ , and as usual — it was sound wisdom.

“The Peloponnesian War resulted in the decimation of Athens,” she said, matter-of-factly. “It was the greatest city in Greece, and it never recovered from the devastation. The war ended the golden age of Greece, and some say it spurred generations of civil wars to come. I wouldn’t call that ‘glorious’, Mr Wolfe.”

The director’s attention was partly elsewhere, since he’d been approached by one of the managers with something to sign. “History is a cycle of destruction and rebirth, Diana,” he said patiently, scribbling his signature. “Which — conveniently — leaves us with the illustrious task of protecting the relics of the ages. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get that across to the donors tonight.”

Diana was still standing by the statue of Athena when he excused himself and moved on to handle some other last-minute matters. She was thinking of war now, of Ares, and the inevitability of history — as he’d said. Destruction, rebirth. Loss, hope. Chaos, calm.

 _How did you bear it, sister?_ she thought. _One hundred years, and I’m still learning._

* * *

Diana loved her office in the Metropolis History Museum, a hushed little room that felt more like a cozy alcove than a place where she conducted business, walled by old books and velveted drawers full of untold treasures, with the habitually odd artifact sitting on her desk or on one of the side tables, waiting their turn to be examined.

Today was no exception, but after being pulled away for most of the day by the museum’s overly nervous director, Diana was only getting to the appraisal now. She was well aware that the museum was full of guests at present, glittering and laughing in the company of history’s greatest treasures, but if given the choice between artifacts and people — Diana preferred the quiet.

The folds of her evening dress rustled gently as she carefully turned the sword over to catch the light. Its prior owner claimed to have unearthed it near the Great Wall in the last century, carefully preserved and kept lovingly since then. A family treasure, and a beautiful example of Qing dynasty weaponry.

Diana set it down with a small sigh. “Forgery,” she muttered to herself.

A good one, but a forgery nonetheless. A discovered fake was always a disappointment, because Diana loved to preserve and display the world’s treasures, some obvious, some less so. She loved to see beauty protected, admired for what it was, to watch people’s faces as they strolled through the exhibits, through time and history. No two expressions were ever the same, and she loved the innocence of it, the genuine human reaction to seeing something of beauty.

All the museums reminded her a little of the white tower back in Themyscira, the squared, fortress-like block rising out of a sheer cliff. The separate, labyrinth-like rooms, lit only by the blazing sun during the day and the gentler moon in the night. Treasures, displayed as the history of the Amazons. The way her mother used to hold her hand and walk her through the many gifts the gods of Olympus had seen fit to bestow upon her people. When Antiope would take time from her training to accompany them, chiming in with a detail her mother had missed every now and then, and a silent wink when Hippolyta’s back was turned to tell Diana that she’d get the full story — later, and in private.

Sometimes Diana lingered at the exhibits to hear the guide answer questions, and that reminded her of Hippolyta too (a sharp, strangely _right_ pang there, because she _should_ miss her mother, and she did, every single day). But sometimes the sight of a weapon, slim and scarred from battle, or a piece of armor, gracefully forged and weathered from use, would remind her of Antiope. Her warrior aunt, the fiery sun to Hippolyta’s silvered moon, the fearless general who died in defense of their home. In defense of Diana.

It was strange, how Diana found herself thinking about the past (more and more as of late), as the one-hundredth anniversary of her first encounter with the world of man loomed. She wondered if it was a subconscious sign of some sort, a sign that she ought to find her way back home. Her _real_ home.

Diana’s earrings flashed in the low light when she gave her head a firm shake. _No_. For a number of reasons, the answer had to be no. Or at least…not yet.

But _not yet_ and _forever_ meant the former could take a very, very long time.

There was a knock on the door, and she looked around, a little surprised, but maybe a little relieved to have a distraction. “Yes?” she said.

The door swung open, revealing a familiar tuxedoed figure leaning on the frame. “Working late?” Bruce said.

Diana narrowed her eyes in half-joking suspicion as he approached, bearing two glasses of champagne, one of which he gave to her. “Whenever you duck out of a party, it usually means you’re up to something, Bruce,” she said, turning her chair to face him. “If your mission is to steal from the dear trustees of the Metropolis History Museum, I’ll have to object.”

Bruce was standing by her desk, reading the spines of the books in her wall. “What if it’s stealing from one of the guests?” he asked, offhandedly.

Diana took a sip of champagne, careful not to get anything on her silver dress. “Lex Luthor was the exception, not the rule.”

“Good thing it was just a hypothetical then,” he said. “I’m here socializing. Alfred won’t let me back into the mansion until I clock in a few more hours as Bruce Wayne.”

Bruce said it like a joke (as close to a joke as he was capable of, anyway) but having met Alfred on numerous occasions and seen his less-than-impressed attitude when it came to Bruce’s dedication to being the Batman — Diana believed him.

“And naturally, you decide to come find the person who knows your secret identity,” she said, amused. “Don’t make me call Alfred to report you.”

“Traitor,” Bruce said. “Congratulations, by the way.”

Diana tipped her head to one side. “For?”

“One hundred years.” Bruce was looking at her. “Give or take. You were never really clear on the specifics.”

 _Ah._ Diana didn’t say anything at first, her thoughts going to the drawer in her nightstand, and the photograph kept carefully away. A photograph Bruce had been responsible for returning to her.

They didn’t know.

Bruce was the exception, because he knew more than most, but the picture was still far, far short of complete. His congratulations took her by surprise; she hadn’t expected him to remember, not what she'd told him about the photograph, as sparse as the story was in details. Her mother would have chided her over the threadbare storytelling, for leaving out the things that mattered the most. Bruce was aware of why she left Themyscira, why she fought in the War, and how she beat Ares, the God of War himself.

But not Steve. Not Sameer, or Charlie, or Chief, or Etta.

He knew their names, but not…not who they were. Who they’d been. Those were the secrets she wanted to keep to herself, as though telling someone else about them, how they'd lived, how they'd laughed and fought and struggled and triumphed...it would make them less real to her, just a story of old names and old faces, all gone now. Impossible to believe, because how could someone have been alive in the Great War and still be alive today?

Besides, even if she told someone: Dinah, Bruce, or maybe even Barry, they wouldn’t live forever. They would pass on, the same way Etta and Charlie and the others did, and Diana would be left with more stories, more names and memories that only she remembered. After nearly a century, the thought of doing it all over again just made her immeasurably sad.

So instead, she pushed off her chair and stepped back into her high-heeled shoes — silver, to match her dress — straightening up next to Bruce with a small smile. “Thank you,” she said.

That was something she liked about Bruce; he never asked for the full story, not unless it was something she wanted to share.

“Don’t thank me yet,” he said, as they left her office together. “I convinced Barry not to throw you a party. You’re welcome.”

Diana’s laugh made Bruce smile, just a little, and they walked side by side towards the party.

* * *

“Mr Wayne — so good to see you!”

“Mr Wayne, we _must_ have lunch sometime —”

“Mr Wayne, and Ms — oh, _Prince_ —”

Diana returned another empty glass of champagne to a white-suited waiter ( _intoxicated_ was not a viable possibility for someone with her biology) and continued her wide circle around the gallery with Bruce. “That counts as socializing,” she said dryly. “I think you almost shook hands with him for two seconds.”

“That’s how people like us say hello,” he said, smiling and waving to someone else in passing. “By the way, we need to discuss the new security protocols at the base.”

“No, we don’t,” Diana said, smiling at someone she knew from the Louvre, ignoring the curious stares from the guests who clearly assumed she was the short-lived date of Gotham’s most eligible billionaire. “That’s not _Bruce Wayne_ talk, that’s the other one. Alfred wouldn’t approve.”

“You’re not going to talk to me about something important because my butler doesn’t want you to?”

There was something about Bruce that made it easy to trade roles. Instead of being the weary immortal tired of humanity, it was easy to become someone playful, to tease the human man — so, _so_ young by comparison — who carried what seemed like an age of sadness behind his eyes.

“I’m trying to get you to enjoy your evening as a normal human being, yes,” Diana said sweetly. “Imagine the irony of having to learn how to be normal from someone like me.”

“Immortal warrior, Amazon, or demigoddess?” Bruce muttered, as they passed behind a marble statue of Theseus on their way up to the balcony. “We’re shorthanded for the week, and you know it, Diana.”

Diana rolled her eyes a little, ignoring the reminder — the unnecessary one — that she was on duty tonight, which meant turning up at headquarters after the gala. The arrangement was meant to hold for the rest of the week, until Clark, Hal and Arthur returned from a mission to the Guardians on Oa. Planets, galaxies and their many, many orbits meant very little to Diana, but it sufficed to say that they were on another world, and Diana didn't need an ability to read minds to know that their collective absence made Bruce wary.

Well, _more_ wary than usual.

“I think we can handle things by ourselves for the week,” she said. “No need to spend the whole time with twenty police radios glued to your ear.”

“Ha-ha,” Bruce said sarcastically.

Diana stopped them in front of the large, glittering windows, filled now with a view of Metropolis after sunset. It was a good view, overlooking the heart of the city rather than the river, a reminder of what was at stake, both good and bad, light and dark, deserving and not.

_It’s not about deserve, it’s about what you believe._

Diana had thought the words to herself too many times to count, but they didn’t become any less true, no matter how much time passed her by.

“A lot can change in a hundred years,” Bruce remarked. Unlike her, he’d turned away from the windows, but was looking over the side of the circular balcony, towards the party below.

Diana joined him. People looked different from a distance, easier to see as all the same, for all their conflicts and their dissimilarities. Mr Wolfe, she could spot easily near the statue of Athena, his pride and jewel of the evening, gesturing like an orchestra conductor as he told his story.

History as a cycle of destruction and rebirth — how very true indeed.

“Yes,” Diana said quietly. “But many things stay the same.”

The evening showed every sign of being a completely quiet one, as Diana had predicted. But if one thing was certain about her time with humanity, it was the fact that things could become very, very different in the span of a few seconds.

As they did when the gunshots shattered the sounds of the party, and smoke exploded to fill the room.

* * *

“What the hell?” Bruce said, peering down to the floor below.

Diana scanned the billowing white smoke for the source. It was spreading rapidly; some kind of smoke bomb, or a gas canister, helped by the unseen footsteps that were rolling more across the room, and moving to the adjacent galleries to do the same.

Screams and yells of surprise, but only in the distance, almost like the people directly below them were —

Diana moved, grabbing Bruce by the front of his suit, and a second later they were both in the emergency stairwell, and she was shutting the twin doors firmly behind them to cut off the smoke.

“It’s knockout gas,” she said, by way of an explanation.

Bruce’s only response was to reach up and undo his bowtie. “Hostages?”

“Or burglary,” Diana said, leading them towards the back stairwell. She knew where the cameras were, and how to avoid being seen. “There’s easily a fortune on display already, and more, if they get inside the vaults.”

“You have your gear?” Bruce asked.

“Office,” she said, kicking off her shoes as they descended the steps. “You have your suit?”

“Car,” he said. “See you in a minute.”

Diana nodded, and they split off into opposite directions. She didn’t know who the intruders were, or what they were after, but she had a feeling they were about to be very, very surprised.

* * *

“Heat vision reads twelve hostiles in the Red Gallery,” Bruce said, over the comms. “Same in the main hall, and some kind of heat bloom.”

There was a dull roar and a glimmer of pale blue, barely visible through the dense gray-white clouds of smoke. “Cutting torch?” Diana murmured.

“Probably,” he said. “Now we know why they’re here.”

Diana was watching from above, crouched at the top of a towering marble column like a gargoyle on the edge of a roof. Visibility was still low because of the gas, trapped inside the space on purpose. But what she saw was eerie enough: bodies lying still and unmoving on the ground, obscured when the smoke shifted again to hide them, and armed men, their faces disguised with gas masks, and armed to the teeth. Soldiers. Civilians.

She jerked her head, once. _No_. It wasn’t like the war. Not like the village, after. Not Veld. The people weren’t dead. This time, they could be saved.

She’d save them.

“There are two hundred people inside this museum,” she said. “We need to stop this, now.”

“I’m in the security mainframe now — get ready to move,” Bruce said. “We’re changing things up. Divide and conquer.”

“Copy.” Diana’s hand hovered near the lasso at her belt, ready for the signal.

The alarms started to blare inside the museum, deep, and booming, and the security gates over every doorway and window came to life at once, hurtling towards the ground and landing with identical, echoing crashes.

Diana’s lasso ignited at her touch, a familiar golden glow that whipped into the smoke below to ensnare one of the armed guards. There was a yell of surprise, abruptly cut off when a single twitch of her arms sent him flying into the air, and Diana stepped off the edge of the pillar, hurtling towards the ground.

The guard slammed into the marble at her feet, unconscious, his gas mask askew, and Diana turned her head left and right, counting the number of masked faces she could see through the smoke. “Shall we?” she said.

A dozen guns snapped to attention, and Diana launched herself into the air. The bullets punched into the marble column where she’d been just seconds before, and Diana went to work. Her lasso sent guns skidding to opposite ends of the room, dragged their owners bodily across the floor and slammed them into walls, wielded as if it were an extension of her limbs.

The smoke had been their camouflage, now it was their strategic misstep. Diana had trained for this on Themyscira, against thick, choking smoke spewing black from braziers, in the daylight and in the black of night, flaming arrows flying at her from unseen archers, with only a knife to defend herself.

This, by comparison, easier.

For one thing, knockout gas didn’t work on her. Diana crushed an assault rifle to scrap metal in one fist and blocked a bullet with her raised forearm, turning the lead to glowing sparks against her bracer. Only a few left now, and they were circling, making use of their numbers.

Diana could still hear the cutting torch; whatever they’d come to steal, it was important enough not to stop at signs of trouble. She was hidden in the smoke, and she used it to her advantage. She drew her sword with a slash of steel and slid across the floor, dodging underneath the gunfire. Two more guards crashed to the ground, and Diana disarmed a third with the lasso, slamming both feet into his chest and leaving him crumpled at the foot of a statue.

The cutting torch slid from his limp hand, and Diana kicked it aside, surveying her surroundings to try and ascertain what they’d been trying to steal. The answer was obvious enough, up close, even though it didn’t quite make sense.

The statue of Athena towered over her, its hand — the one holding the broken spear — blackened and cracked from the cutting torch, like the thieves had been trying to remove the piece of the incomplete weapon from the sculpture.

Diana frowned at the black marks in the marble, which was how she almost missed it.

She turned just in time to see a figure jump down from the balcony, landing easily — effortlessly — in the center of the room. Armored gear just like the others, and disguised, but not with a gas mask, even though the room was still swirling with soporific smoke. The mask was made from some kind of dark mesh covering the entire face, and apart from the glint of bright hair — brown or gold — through the fog, the only thing she could really tell from the build was that the thief was male.

The ease of his landing made her wary. Something was different about him. Like he had been the one giving the orders, and he’d been watching her fight from above the whole time, only intervening when necessary.

Diana shifted, standing in front of Athena’s statue with her sword at her side. “This doesn’t belong to you,” she said.

Based on past experience and the slumped bodies of his accomplices, Diana knew how it would end, and if this masked thief knew what was good for him, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to try.

Fight or flee. Those were the only two responses, and when his arm reached behind his back for his gun, Diana moved. Gunshots peppered the air, smashing glass, sending display shelves and their contents cascading noisily to the ground. She threw up her forearm, blocking a bullet that should have found her skull, and slashed downward with her sword.

It missed, sinking into the marble instead. Only Diana never missed. She turned, catching his kick at the last second. Undaunted, he twisted and slammed the flat of his palm into her chest, hard enough to send her skidding backwards.

Her chest throbbed; the blow had been hard enough to stop her short. Because it wasn’t just training — it was more than any human should have been able to do.

“What are you?” she said.

He moved, and this time Diana was ready. The glowing lasso coiled around his leg like a snake and she dragged him back. Glass shards and the shattered exhibits were all over the floor, and as her strength carried him backward, his grip closed around a fallen battle-axe and he kicked off the ground with one foot, swiping the weapon at her throat. She arched backwards to avoid it — only by a hairsbreadth because he was _fast_ — and thrust her open palm out to intercept it the second time, bending the metal with her fingers.

Diana hit back, sending him skidding halfway across the room from a punch to his middle, and her lasso zipped around his throat before he could get to his feet again. She tugged, and he landed hard, his head far enough back that the lasso snagged on his chin, underneath his mask. There was a grunt from him now — more annoyance than frustration — and he hurled something towards the windows that exploded with a roar of flame, blowing out the ceiling-high panes of glass.

It had been rigged as an escape route, a failsafe. The bomb turned her vision white for just a second, and Diana felt the lasso shudder, growing hot, a warning that he was trying to slip loose. Her grip tightened in defiance and the golden glow was fiercer than ever when she yelled, yanking him back for a final time.

The mask flew into the air and bounced off the ground at her feet, and Diana narrowed her eyes at the unveiled stranger. It was hard to see at first; the remaining white gas was sweeping towards the yawning windows, mingling with the fires burning in the charred debris and the black smoke billowing towards the sky. The uneven firelight glowed on the blond hair whipping around his face, a strangely familiar sight, as if she knew it from somewhere — somehow. Diana stepped forward again, and the outline of the face sharpened, features shading into greater detail, and she felt herself freeze.

Because for a second, the memories it triggered took her far, far away. To another time, nearly a century ago. _Him_. A jarring clash between her past, something she’d kept far, far out of sight and of mind, now smashing unapologetically into her present.

He looked the same. His hair looked windswept, as though the freedom of flying, high above the ground, in the clouds, it had a way of following him wherever he went. Cheekbones and jaw shadowed with the stubble she remembered scraping at her knuckles, unfamiliar on her chin and lips. Tinged now with the bloody red glow of the fire, and the golden glow of the lasso still around his neck, throwing into sharp relief a small scrape on his chin, a scratch on his cheek. Still handsome, as handsome as she remembered him to be. The eyes were the last thing Diana could bring herself to look at, to ascertain, and it still cut her to the quick. Because they were the same piercing color. Blue as the open sky, blue as the water that nearly drowned him, the water she pulled him from.

Diana felt a sound rise in her throat, clawing at the muscles like it wanted to be free, but she couldn’t let it go. Because there was something wrong with what she was seeing. Something different, for all that looked the same. The blue eyes she stared into had no recognition in them, even as Diana heard the name over and over inside her head, because this was a bad dream. It could _only_ be a bad dream, a memory from the past that she’d mistaken for the present.

But no matter how much she tried to wake from it, to shake herself loose from its grip, nothing changed.

Blue looked into brown, and Diana finally spoke.

"Steve?" she said, and the single, broken word came out as a question compelling him to answer.

Nothing in his face changed, nothing at all. As though it didn’t matter who he was. As though it didn’t matter that she knew him. "Yes," he answered, and his voice — _that_ voice, always carrying a little hoarseness — confused her all over again, so much that she didn’t register in time the way his arm slid carefully behind his back.

Diana didn’t catch it. She could have, but she didn’t, and the concussion grenade blasted her back, far, far back. She was lying on the cracked, blistered marble with the taste of ash in her mouth, an impossible name on her lips and an even more impossible ghost behind her eyes. Her ears were still ringing when she got up again, but the only thing left was the empty lasso, dull and ordinary now.

It couldn’t be. Steve — the plane — she watched him climb onboard, disappear through the open door. She'd been on the ground, pinned and helpless to do anything but watch when the same plane erupted into fire in the night sky. She screamed and fought and raged at the injustice of it all, the waste, the loss, the grief…

But here she was, faced just seconds ago with someone who looked identical to the man she met in 1918. He’d looked at her with no recognition, and tried to kill her. Non-combatants, put in harm’s way without need or concern. That was something Steve would never have done. It couldn’t be him.

Yet. The lasso of Hestia compelled the truth from anyone it bound, and Diana had asked him — this masked thief — a question. He’d answered with what could only be the truth.

_Steve?_

_Yes._

It couldn't be, but it was. Captain Steve Trevor hadn’t died on that German plane in 1918. How, or why, she had no idea.

But he was still alive, and she had to find him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- It started a little slow because I wanted to give a general picture of what Diana's life is like in the present day (plus a little Bruce/Diana banter, which is always fun)  
> \- "Grand theft museum statue" isn't exactly as thrilling as Bucky's escapades, but eh.  
> \- I know Bucky doesn't remember who he is at the initial confrontation with Steve, I'm taking artistic liberties :)  
> I'm on Tumblr (Chronicolicity) if anyone wants to come cry about the ending of the movie and stuff.


	2. No Time For Rest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Thanks for the feedback! It was seriously awesome to see how many people are still completely not over Steve and Diana (*sobs*). So...I guess I'm continuing this. Please subscribe and comment, and here we go :)

Diana ran water into the sink until it was clear instead of pink. Pieces of shrapnel — from the grenade she should have caught — dropped into the stained basin as she pulled them out herself. They left dark wounds in her neck and shoulders, minor ones, and she knew they’d heal overnight, in a matter of hours.

That didn’t matter.

What mattered, what mattered was —

The porcelain cracked with the sound of breaking bone as Diana’s fists clenched around the sides of the sink, fine white dust slipping between her fingers. She felt her shoulders shake, and her hair stuck to her damp face as she cried old tears, tears she'd promised not to shed over a lost friend, a good man and honorable soldier, a casualty of an unnecessary, cruel war. To her, a lost possibility, and a question she’d never answer.

Steve gave her the watch that sat in her bedside drawer, the watch she brought with her all around the world. His was the smiling face she carried in her thoughts, during the quiet nights and the noisy crowds, when she felt the most alone. She remembered so clearly putting her face close to his, during those last, frantic moments. The sound of the bombs still ringing in her ears, drowning out the words he’d meant to be his last.

That smiling face was the same one she had to reconcile with the expressionless stare when she’d had him bound by the lasso, and compelled him to answer with the truth. The Steve who’d always looked at her with warmth and laughter — or seriousness and concern, _desperation_ , even — with the Steve she'd just seen, fighting to kill with strength he shouldn’t have had and skills she never thought he’d use against her.

_Who are you?_

_Who have you become?_

* * *

When Diana walked into Bruce’s lab, the first thing she saw was the fragment of the marble spear sitting in the center of a whirring machine, and him bending closer to see as another cutting torch sliced across the surface.

“Hey,” he said, and she saw him take in the bandages peeking out from the collar of her shirt.

Diana gave her head a silent shake, and he shut his mouth, not asking the obvious question. “The gala?” she asked, steeling herself for the bad news. “How many dead?”

“No deaths. Just casualties — they were all rushed to Metropolis General. Including your friend Mr Wolfe.”

Diana breathed a small sigh of relief. A small blessing, but an important one. “Good,” she said. “And Bruce — about what happened tonight — the others don’t need to know. It’s…it’s a personal matter.”

“You know I can keep a secret,” he said, and powered down the machine, leaving the room quiet. “But I don’t understand why I’m keeping it. What _happened_ out there?”

Diana was someone who stood her ground, literally and metaphorically. Always. But now, with Bruce sitting on the edge of the table and looking at her with concern, confusion — and wanting an explanation — she had to break away, to pace, to stand apart.

“It was Steve,” she said simply. “It’s him.”

“Steve…” Bruce prompted, clearly thinking she’d meant someone else. Someone who hadn’t been dead for nearly a century. “He was one of the mercenaries?”

“Not _one of them_ , Bruce, he was — they were all working for him,” she said, just as unsure about the rest of the story as him. Except for the fact he was still stubbornly missing. “I saw Steve Trevor. He was the thief they sent after the object, the statue. I fought him, I pulled away his disguise, and it was him. It was _Steve_.”

Bruce’s eyebrows snapped together, fast, and she sensed him running rapidly through his responses. The first of them being: whether she was still in full possession of her sanity. The second, most likely, was whether he’d remembered the name wrong, because —

“…1918,” he said, finally. “After I sent you the original of the photograph, you told me that Trevor died in 1918. That he fought alongside you in the First World War. He must have been born in the 1890s, he has a military record — he’s been marked deceased for almost a century. He’s dead, Diana. He has to be.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” Diana snapped. “But I’m telling you what I saw, and I _saw_ him with my own eyes, I _fought_ him. I wouldn’t imagine that, I couldn’t imagine that. He’s alive — somehow — he’s alive.”

“Diana,” Bruce said, because he seemed to think she'd listen. Maybe she would — hear him, anyway. “You’re the only one who saw the attacker’s face. Everyone else was knocked out. You’ve been thinking a lot about the past lately, maybe…”

The expression on Diana’s face must have convinced him to set aside his first strategy, which was to suggest she might have mistaken wishful thinking for reality, and adopt his fallback. “Steve Trevor is dead,” he said, without malice. “He should be dead. That photo of the two of you was taken in 1918. He'd be over a hundred years old now — and that’s _if_ he survived the explosion and the thirty thousand feet drop.”

Diana whirled, her fist slamming into one of the steel tables in frustration, leaving a dent. “I _know_ , Bruce, trust me — I know. But the lasso compels whoever it binds to tell the truth, and he said his name was Steve. He looks like Steve, he talks like Steve — his face, his body —”

“Yes,” Bruce said, evenly. “He said his name was Steve. But the truth is relative. If he believes it to be true, if that's what he's been told, then it'll still register as the truth.”

Diana’s gaze sharpened. “What do you mean?” she said. “Are you saying my lasso was deceived?”

“It’s just a hypothesis,” Bruce said calmly. “Ask Dinah. Ask Barry. Both of them work at police precincts, and they see lie-detector tests get beaten all the time.”

“My lasso,” Diana returned icily, “is not _any_ lie detector test.”

Anyone else would have withered under the look Diana had on her face, but Bruce was a detective by nature, and she could tell that he was absorbed with the mystery, the unanswered question and the seemingly unbeatable paradox.

They’d both seen strange things, experienced them firsthand. Some, like Clark and Barry and Dinah, were exceedingly good. Others, like the names haunting the stories of Gotham that Bruce would never tell, like the monstrosity Lex Luthor had created in what little remained of the dead planet Krypton, were devastatingly bad.

Diana wasn’t sure which category Steve Trevor’s impossible reappearance fell into, but she knew without question that she had to see it through.

It only remained whether Bruce would help, make the mistake of trying to stop her, or simply…stand aside.

“Okay,” Bruce said, finally. “Okay. If it _was_ Trevor, then we _definitely_ need to start eliminating possibilities. Maybe I can reach out to Constantine to see how this might be possible. If magic or the supernatural is at work, John Constantine should be able to tell us. But if it isn't, if it's science — like a clone —”

Diana started to interrupt him, but Bruce continued anyway.

“— _if_ it’s a clone of Captain Trevor,” he said determinedly, “then things change. Don't they?”

They looked at each other, stubbornness bristling between them. “Why?” Diana asked. “Why should it make a difference if it's Steve in essence? His DNA will be the same — it’s the same man.”

Diana despised the way she sounded, wanting so desperately to believe something that she’d accept — or think about accepting — even a shadow of Steve Trevor, as long as it meant that he’d have a chance to live the life he never got.

Was it guilt? Love?

She didn’t know, but she had a feeling Bruce did.

“Biologically, he’d be the same,” he said. “But everything else will be different. He wasn't born in the 19th century and raised in the 20th. He'll be someone else. He'll look like Steve, but on the inside…”

“He won’t make the same choices or be the same person,” Diana said dully, because she understood, and it ached like a mortal blow. “Good. Brave. Honorable.”

“Exactly,” Bruce said. “And if he's a clone who's been made to think he's Steve Trevor, there's something darker at play. Throwing him in our way today — _your_ way — was meant as a distraction. 

Something dark and twisted reared itself at the suggestion, because it _was_ a dark one indeed. The thought that someone would engineer — for purposeful and willful use — a lookalike of Steve Trevor, or Steve Trevor himself, somehow, as a weapon against her…

Diana continued to pursue Bruce’s train of thought. It was a familiar path to her; she knew how he rationalized and picked apart sequences of events, and it wasn’t hard at all to guess his priorities. The collective safety always came first. The Justice League. “A distraction,” she said, thinking aloud. “Because I'm the most powerful member of the League. Clark's gone. Hal and Arthur with him. All gone. You think the timing of this was intentional.”

“I think Barry might object to that if he were here,” Bruce said dryly, “but yes. A distraction. Someone they know you'll never fight.”

There was a question there, and Diana could read Bruce well enough to know what he was asking her.

If Steve became an insurmountable obstacle, what would she do?

It had been a hundred years since Diana first came to the human world, and Steve Trevor embodied that first in a way that no one else could. Not Etta, or Sameer, or Charlie, or Chief. He’d stood by her through the naivety of thinking that killing one rogue god could stop a legion of armies from massacring each other. He’d stood by her when that turned out not to be true, by not losing faith when she had — in humanity’s deservingness to be saved.

Because to Steve, it didn’t matter whether humanity, flawed and beautiful and scarred and imperfect, deserved his help. The only thing that mattered was what he believed, and Steve had believed all the way to his last breath, his last laugh, his last smile.

He’d saved countless lives, but no one had saved him.

 _She_ hadn’t saved him.

What if this was her chance — _their_ chance — to make things right?

Diana felt a small pain drive its way deeper inside her chest at the thought. “I couldn’t save him once,” she said. “I’m not going to fail him again. I won't, so don't ask me to.”

Bruce didn't seem the least bit surprised by her answer. “That’s what they’re counting on,” he said, and turned back to the fragment they’d retrieved. “Someone wants this bad enough to try and eliminate any chance it might be pursued, especially by you. I say we try to understand why, and in the meantime, the object stays under lockdown with us. That’s the safest place for it right now.”

Diana picked up the fragment, careless of whether it had cooled from the heat of the cutting torch. There were cracks all along the pale marble, crossing and crisscrossing each other from the two sets of cuts — Bruce’s, and the mercenaries’. Hairline thin, but Diana could feel the weight of it in her hands, something she never would have been able to do, had it still been attached to the statue, and something wasn’t right.

It didn’t feel heavy enough, as solid marble should have. It felt…hollow. Diana looked even more closely, and she could just about see the faintest glimmer of metal, a spidering network of dark gold.

“There’s something inside it,” she said, and twisted.

Bruce started towards her. “Diana, _careful_ —”

The marble broke apart in her hands like the shell of an egg, hairline thin and fragile. Diana brushed the rest of it off and let the splintered pieces fall to the floor, exposing the true body of the artifact.

“Now why didn’t I think of that?” Bruce muttered, and stepped a little closer to see. “What is it? Looks like it’s made of bronze.”

Diana nodded, turning the unearthed relic over in her hands. “Ancient bronze,” she said quietly, like her breath could disturb the metal. “A fragment within a fragment.”

It was highly unremarkable at first, a plain rounded cylinder, small enough to fit in the palm of a hand — which her experience immediately suggested might be a grip of some kind. But what it had been attached to was anyone’s guess. The obvious possibility was a spear, though she had her doubts it would be that simple. A rod, a weapon, a torch…the possibilities were nearly endless.

“Easily three thousand years old,” she said, breaking off from her thoughts. “I’ve seen relics like this before, Hellenistic antiquities — Greek, I mean — but…”

“But?” Bruce said.

“There’s something strange about it,” she murmured. “No imperfections. No flaws.”

“The marble must have stopped it from tarnishing,” Bruce said, eyeing the lack of green coating over the bronze. “But why would someone want to hide a piece of bronze inside a statue?”

Diana waved her hand. “Not that. Look at the way it’s been forged — and the places where it broke off from the whole — perfect. Not a blemish. There’s something strange about this relic, something inhuman at work, like —”

She broke off, but Bruce was still looking at her, waiting. “Like?”

Diana shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t tell you,” she said, and returned it to the table. “All I know is that the first time I met Steve Trevor, he came with a warning about weapons more deadly than any of us on Themyscira could imagine. What if this — crossing paths again— what if this is fate? A repeating pattern?”

Bruce didn't look convinced either way. Neutral. “What weapon?” he said. “What war?”

Diana shook her head. “If I’m going to ask him that, I’ll need to find him.”

Bruce was staring at the relic. “Call it a gut feeling,” he said. “But he might be the one to find us first.”

* * *

Steve opened his eyes. Silently awake, with a metallic taste in his mouth. They’d given him something to make him sleep again. He used to come awake with gasps and shouting, making restraints around his arms and legs a practical necessity. Those days were long gone, and now he woke quietly, and without protest.

But the restraints stayed.

He was in a chair in a dark, featureless room. The stark, pale light shone down from above, making it hard to look anywhere but ahead. Which he did now, facing a man in a white coat, glasses on his nose, a screen on his knee. “Welcome back,” he said. “Can you tell me your name?”

The people who asked the questions never seemed to have the same face, and Steve had stopped trying to remember them. Years, decades could pass between his periods of consciousness, leaps of time he missed when they put him to sleep. The questions, however, never varied. His name, always the first litmus test.

“My name is Steve Trevor,” he said. “Code name: Ares.”

“Good.” He folded his hands in front of him. “Now, tell me what happened. On your last mission. You were brought in for the purposes of retrieving an item of importance to your superiors — and as I understand it, you were unsuccessful.”

Less time than he’d thought. A day, maybe less. It made no difference to him that he knew it.

“Yes,” Steve said. “I successfully diverted the cargo onto the pre-arranged route using the decoy crew. Based on available intelligence, I surmised that the Justice League might become involved, so I created contemporaneous incidents to keep their attention elsewhere. In the event of substantial collateral damage on a wide, fast-moving scale, the Flash would likely be deployed to mitigate casualties. Members like the Batman and the Black Canary are unable to fly or travel at enhanced speeds, so creating obstructions would eliminate them as potential players in the operation. And —”

He broke off, experiencing a sudden, inexplicable urge to hesitate.

“And?” his interrogator prompted.

“And I was unsuccessful,” Steve answered. “The traps went off according to plan, but the mission was unsuccessful.”

“Because of an encounter with Wonder Woman. Is that correct?”

Steve flinched again, and his fingers curled into the chair, his knuckles blanched white from the strength of his grip.

_Steve?_

_Yes._

That, he remembered. Fighting the woman, aiming to kill. The lasso coiling around his throat like a fiery chain, and the answer he’d forced between his teeth. That was a memory they hadn’t taken from him yet. But —

_You’re a man._

_Do — do I not look like one?_

That couldn’t be explained, because it never happened. Steve had never been lying on a beach, tasting salt water, with the sun in his eyes and someone’s hand on his cheek. It couldn’t have been him, but he could _hear_ the sound of the waves lapping at the shore, the weight of his wet clothes, clinging to his skin along with a gritty coat of sand, how fast he’d been breathing, and…her.

Her face. Beautiful and fiercely alive, thrumming with something that defied description, tied to the reason why he’d flinched and why he’d hesitated. Because it was like trying to focus on something that was flickering in and out of view, like a dozen different images laid over each other at once. Steve saw her face under a dim, bluish glow, in shades of blended shadow and slow, flickering warmth, smudged with soot and dirt in a cold gray light, over and over again, from angles and in colors he couldn’t explain, or remember.

The single, unifying thing they had in common was that it was the same face that had stared at him through the fire today like she knew him, with shock, disbelief, and something…more. More raw, but also more real.

There was something vast and empty inside of Steve, and he’d made his peace with that a long, long time ago, doing what he did, being who he was. But that emptiness today _echoed_ at the look on her face, the sound of her voice, like it wanted to answer some kind of call he didn’t know or understand, except that it _was_.

Steve didn’t understand it, or her. With all he knew about her powers, she could have easily killed or captured him. But she hadn’t. All she seemed able to do was ask him the question, like the name — his name — meant something to her.

_Why?_

The man in front of him coughed, gently, and Steve snapped back to the present again. “Let me ask you a different question. Did she ask who you were?”

“Yes.”

“And did you tell her?”

Steve’s brow furrowed, but he answered anyway. It was pointless to lie. “Yes,” he said.

The people who asked the questions never showed emotion, but this time, the man smiled, and Steve thought he saw a flicker of purple flame behind the glasses before the light glazed them white again. The man got to his feet, and the blackness at the edges of the dark room began to shift strangely, as though they hadn’t been alone the whole time, but watched by the unseen. “Very good, Steve,” he said. “You’ve done very well indeed.”

Steve could feel the chair tilting back, in preparation for the next volley of shocks to wipe his brain clean. He was meant to be resigned to it, but inside he felt something twist and rear like it wanted to be free.

Because time passed while he was asleep, without expectation or control over when he might wake, and for all he knew, the woman might be gone when they pulled him back to the world again.

Steve didn’t know why he cared, just that a small, inexplicable part of him did.

A shadow appeared between him and the light. “Your next mission will begin very shortly,” he said. “Captain Trevor.”

_Captain?_

But before Steve could ask, electricity surged into his muscles and his jaw clenched tight, cutting off any sound he might have made. Steve’s vision was fading, but he swore the shadowy shape was flickering, edged with a strange, violet flame before a low, taunting laugh — a woman’s laugh — made everything go black.

* * *

“Nothing here,” Diana said, paging through a dusty book she’d borrowed from the museum library. “How can there still be nothing? I assumed someone with as many rich friends as you would know _all_ about priceless antiques.”

Bruce was still scrolling through line after line of database searches on the monitor in front of him, just one of many surrounding him like walls in his obligatory cave, and he didn't look around at the implied swipe at his social circle.

“As opposed to an immortal warrior who was alive when said antiquities were still contemporary,” he responded. “You’re the one who found the relic — if anyone’s going to find out what it is, it’s you.”

Diana arched one eyebrow. “Why would one man kill another over a mere object?” she wondered aloud. “When you’ve been alive as long as I have and seen what humans will do to each other over the smallest, most insignificant things, you stop asking the question.”

Bruce made a noise under his breath that might have meant _touché_. “Glad to see we still haven’t managed to surprise you, even after a hundred years.”

“Yet I’m still here,” Diana said, with a small sigh. “Still fighting.”

They were different in a lot of ways, but the same in a few, crucial respects. Neither of them were capable of keeping out of the fight — not for long. No matter how much they lost, no matter how much it ached.

Bruce didn’t say anything, but she could sense the weight of his thoughts, his memories, pressing down on him like Atlas and the world. He carried things too easily, for someone with only the strength of a human. His determination to fight, that was where he exceeded humanity, maybe equal to one of the gods. But Diana was part god herself, and she knew that being immortal didn’t make it any easier to see loved ones snatched away. By time, or something more sinister.

It was quiet inside the lab, with the both of them turned to their respective tasks, looking for clues that might shed some light on the nature of the relic they’d found, now safe behind lock and very computerized key in the Watchtower's vaults. Diana scanned page after page of Ancient Greek for some corresponding description, but she had a feeling they were outmatched in their search for a needle in the very, very vast haystack.

“Our problem,” she said, setting down another book, “is that we only have a _piece_ of whatever it’s meant to be. How do we know what it is unless we have the rest?”

Bruce blew out his breath. “Well, I’m assuming there’s a _story_ about how the relic became just a piece, and since you’re the only one here who reads Ancient Greek —”

“— and Egyptian, and Latin, and Ottoman…” Diana muttered.

“Okay, my Greek mythology’s a little rusty, but gods liked to play one against the other, right? Send humans to do their bidding?” Bruce said, with an air of proposing another theory. “You’re Zeus’s daughter. Is there any chance that this is one of the gods at work?”

 _Ares_ , she thought immediately, and just as quickly pushed it down. No, she’d killed him, her brother. Vaporized him with Zeus’s lightning. There was no chance that he was anywhere but the depths of Tartarus, and bringing Steve back didn’t make any sense, not for him.

“My mother told me that Ares killed the gods during the Amazon rebellion, and I destroyed _Him_ nearly a century ago,” Diana said, with a shake of her head. “I haven’t seen anything since then to disprove the fact that the gods are dead. Olympus is dead. I’m alone — the last of them.”

“No one’s ever really alone,” Bruce said, and Diana found a small smile, because getting a lecture on solitude from him was just a little ironic, given how he lived most of his life in a way that didn't invite other people into it — not on purpose, and usually not for long.

But her?

The last god, last daughter of Zeus. Destined to watch friends and loved ones wither away while she stayed the same, immortal and gifted with power, but hopeless against the few things beyond even her to change. Like the titan Prometheus, punished for bringing humans fire by being chained to the rocks, with the eagle devouring his insides day after day, an endless, torturous cycle of pain and loss.

Diana sometimes wondered if it was her punishment for leaving Themyscira, for being naive enough to think that killing Ares would raise humanity from its base nature, that killing one rogue god would redeem an eternity of cruelties and unanswerable injustice, and stop the same from happening again. Over, and over.

That was a life best lived alone, and Diana had. Diana _was_.

She lifted her head, her fingertips curled against the dry pages of her book. She was thinking of Steve’s wristwatch, the way he’d pressed it into her hands, using his last, precious minutes to say that he still believed in her, in everything she could do, and that he loved her.

He loved her, but he had to go. Because there were thousands of lives he could save, if he’d just give up his own.

“Before he died, Steve told me that maybe humanity isn’t always good, that maybe...there is no god to blame for why they decide to kill each other, to slaughter innocent people, without cause, without need, and call it war.”

Diana looked at Bruce with a stare as direct as it was decided, regardless of all the uncertainties left in her world. “I don’t believe there’s a god responsible for what Steve is doing, for what he’s become. I believe that people — humans — are behind this, and whoever they are, I won’t let them hurt a man who deserved better than the world showed him.”

Bruce looked at her the same way she remembered Steve doing, more than once. When she’d told him confidently, easily, that defeating Ares would mean the end of the Great War. When every ounce of his skill and training was telling him the opposite, and not to trust her. He’d still gone along with it anyway, with her, until the end.

“Trevor must have been one hell of a guy,” he said, with a small smile. “To make a goddess remember him like that.”

“He was,” Diana said. “He is.”

* * *

Diana was dreaming. She was a girl again. Well, _still_ a girl. A young woman, suspended in time by the magic of the gods, and of the mist-shrouded island unknown to the world.

“ _Harder_ , Diana,” shouted a familiar voice. “You’re stronger than this — you’re strong enough not to doubt yourself!”

Diana felt her arm move at the words, a sword in her hand, rising to block or swing a strike of her own. The gesture was as slow as syrup; she was sleep-drugged and hazy from the dream. Suddenly a sword clashed viciously against hers, blade biting into blade, and all at once, the dream seemed to speed up, colors deepening, sounds becoming louder, echoing in her ears.

“Antiope,” she gasped, as the blonde warrior advanced, a fiery glint in her eye and the faintest smile twisting her lips.

She was the same. Antiope was the same. Unchanged, as Diana remembered her from her earliest days as a child, and their last, on that white-sanded beach salted with the blood of friend and foe. The stretched, shiny skin of old scars gleamed on nearly every inch of her bronzed skin, marks of pride visible above the dark armor emblazoned with the sigil of the eagle, the royal house. The starred bronze diadem Diana never flew into battle without still sitting against her forehead, framing her face like a battle helmet.

Diana felt herself slip a little too, becoming the same person she’d been on the island. A half-forgotten memory now, but as familiar to her as a second skin. Suddenly she was sparring with her favorite aunt, learning from the greatest general the Amazons had ever known, a woman who’d loved her so much that she defied the one of the few people dearest to her in the world — Hippolyta, her sister and the queen — to teach Diana everything she’d need to fight her battles, to become the warrior she was born to be.

Their swords clashed, sprang apart, and clashed again. A rhythm as practiced as a dance at times, but as unpredictable as the strikes of a snake at others. Diana swished her leg across the grass to try and catch Antiope’s, seamlessly alternating between limb and blade as though the two were one and the same.

“Good, Diana,” Antiope said, as she leapt into the air with a yell. “You’re getting better.”

Diana parried Antiope’s swing and brought her sword down hard. It _just_ grazed the side of her aunt's armor, sinking into the grass at their feet instead. She freed the blade and raised it in front of her again, a smile on her face. “I have the best teacher,” she said.

Antiope laughed, but the sound was drowned out by the sudden roar of something passing overhead. Diana raised her head to the sky and saw a plane, streaking through the blue with a blinding trail of fire, spiraling towards the ocean.

Only they weren’t in Themyscira anymore. When Diana turned back to her aunt, they were suddenly in a city, on a gray rooftop cracked from cold and age. Antiope’s gaze was on the horizon, the distant flames of the plane reflected in her bright blue eyes. The wind tugged at her braid, at the leather straps on her armor, and she looked more distant than ever, like she was slipping away from Diana, lost to something more than the world of sleep.

“Antiope,” she said, moving closer as though it might stop her aunt from vanishing. “I’m afraid.”

Antiope gathered Diana’s face in her hands, the corners of her blue eyes creased with a smile. “No warrior is ever truly fearless,” she said, bending closer like it was a secret only Diana was meant to know. “But choosing the battle in spite of the fear is what makes a warrior truly _great_. There’s nothing more I can teach you, my princess, and now you must choose.”

“Choose?”

In the distance, Diana heard the plane crash into the water, the dark river that gleamed with a thousand reflected lights. The sound made her heart race, beating painfully fast inside her chest.

“What will you choose, Diana?” Antiope said, with finality. “This time?”

Diana stared at the ripples spreading out from the place where the plane had vanished, and realized that she’d already made her choice.

Still, Diana lingered. Because she didn’t want to lose Antiope, not again. Even though she was already at peace, laid to rest for nearly a hundred years. Diana gripped her aunt’s scarred hand in her own, pressing a kiss to it before she began to back away. “Goodbye,” she whispered.

Antiope’s hands slipped from her fingers, leaving only the faintest imprints of their warmth. The sword clattered to the ground and Diana ran, not a girl anymore, and leapt clear off the edge of the roof. Her body cut through the air like an arrow, curving into a graceful swan dive, and her hands broke the surface of the black water first.

* * *

Diana snapped awake, sitting bolt upright in her chair. She was breathing hard, her heart hammering inside her chest. All around her were the blazing monitors inside Bruce’s lab, wires humming with electricity, programs being run, processes being carried out.

Bruce was asleep, his head leaned on his hand like he’d been reading when he closed his eyes. Diana quieted her breathing, and pulled herself a little straighter, feeling her pulse slow. At first she thought the dream had been responsible for waking her, until she felt a chill pass the back of her neck.

Something was wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Dun dun intrigue.  
> \- I'm keeping pretty much everyone else in the Justice League out of this? Because otherwise it'd get too distracting.  
> \- Of COURSE there's something hinky going on with Steve's side of things.  
> \- Also, ANTIOPE. WHY. *crying* (It occurs to me that there are SO many things about this movie I am completely not over)  
> \- More action-packed stuff next chapter :)


	3. Sword and Shield

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's some DC comics/movie/TV canon mentioned here, but (again) artistic license is being taken. I definitely do not have the geek credentials to pretend I know very much about the DCEU. Be nice, please :)

Diana's head turned left and right as she moved through the silent hallways. She was surrounded by identical doors and identical computerized locks, gray concrete walls and fluorescents in the ceiling, simple and utilitarian. It was easy to see Bruce’s signature in the layout; everything in the underground facility had been fitted with security protocols he'd designed, meant to send up an alarm at the slightest sign of trouble.

Nothing.

But it didn't banish the feeling of unease in the pit of her stomach, nor did it explain why she'd decided to patrol the corridors in the dead of night, with no armor, no shield or sword, just her lasso and the bracers underneath her long sleeves. Nothing beyond pure instinct, the pervasive feeling that something wasn’t right.

All was still uneventful by the time Diana reached the vaults, but she scanned her palm print at the biometric pad anyway, just to make sure. If it was some residual protectiveness over the relic the thieves and smugglers had fought so hard to obtain, she might as well see it through to the end.

The doors slid apart with a quiet _whoosh_ , and Diana stepped inside the main vault. The air was instantly different, rushing in her direction because of the environmental control systems that kept the oxygen and moisture in the room at a careful balance. In other words, not so different from another museum. Only far, far more advanced.

The battle with Darkseid — the one that first united the team — and plenty of battles since then had left them with a plethora of items to stow away. Bruce and Barry were always interested in studying the properties of alien weapons, possibly to reproduce or develop defences to their effects, while Clark — himself the last of his kind — was keen to preserve items from the various cultures they encountered for the sake of posterity, and out of a quiet respect for the legacies left behind.

Diana's footsteps echoed in the circular space. It had a surprisingly high ceiling for an underground room, the walls smooth and well lit, with a raised podium in the center housing the database computer, surrounded by the items displayed on wall shelves or behind glass, with plenty of spaces for future ones to come.

The mysterious relic they'd retrieved was in one such slot, looking decidedly unremarkable next to the Gorgon's shield and a flame-blackened sword it had been set next to (Bruce might have been attempting to organize the items by historical period). Diana reached out to touch the shield, fingering the symbols carved into the circumference of the bronze. Artifacts always felt like old friends to her, like seeing a familiar face or recognizing a voice. Friendly. Known.

All except for the relic they’d retrieved. There was something strange about it, something Diana didn’t like. It was too quiet, too _unknown_. An innocent facade meant to create a sense of false security, with a wealth of secrets lurking underneath the mystery.

Deceptive.

The thought made Diana frown, and she turned back to the shield. It gleamed in comparison to the tarnished sword, clear enough for Diana to see her own reflection.

And something else.

She moved without hesitation, snatching the shield off the stand and hurling it towards the shape she'd glimpsed in the polished metal, a shape that was unmistakably a human figure. It sliced through the air like an arrow, but never found its mark.

Not quite, anyway. Because the shield had been caught mid-spin, and the hand around the edge, white-knuckled and unflinching, belonged to Steve Trevor.

He'd come for the relic.

Which meant only one thing. Diana would have to fight him.

"Steve," she said, even though she didn't, and would never beg. "Don't do this."

* * *

The shield clattered to the ground, dented slightly around the corners with the imprint of Steve's hand, proof of how hard she'd thrown it. But Steve hadn't even flinched, a sight as unnatural as seeing him alive after a century of thinking, _believing_ , he was dead.

Even stranger was seeing him in a room built in the 21st century, with the both of them dressed in clothes from a hundred years after they'd first met. Her in street clothes, dark pants and a zipped jacket, him in some kind of black paramilitary gear, armed with a gun and who knew what else in his belt. Unsmiling, the both of them, and armed, with every expectation of a fight.

Enemies.

"No armor," he said.

Barely any inflection in the voice she could still remember so clearly, after all this time. The Steve she knew had been animated, sharply funny and alive with wit. The Steve in front of her sounded like a hollowed version of him, an imitation that clung just barely to the traces of what made the man he was.

Diana didn't take her eyes off Steve, even as they circled each other slowly from opposing sides of the room. Sizing up the other. Tension hovering close to a breaking point.

"I'm more than my armor," she said. "It doesn't make me who I am."

"And who's that?"

"Someone you know," she said, without hesitation. "Someone who knows _you_. Captain Steve Trevor, born 1893, Los Angeles, California. You were an American soldier, a pilot in their Air Force, until you joined British Intelligence as their spy. You were returning from a mission to gather intelligence on a new weapon being developed by the Germans when your plane crashed into the sea. I jumped in and saved your life. We left Themyscira together for your world, because there was a mission — stopping the First World War — but you called it the war to end all wars. We fought side by side, back to back in the trenches, in No Man's Land, in Veld, on the airfield —"

Diana felt her voice splinter at the last word, triggered by the memory of the final time she'd seen Steve Trevor — _the_ Steve Trevor — alive. "You know me, Steve," she continued, after drawing a shaking breath. "And I know you. Don't do this."

There had been a shift in Steve's closed expression at the emotion in her voice, nearly imperceptible, and it vanished now, replaced by the look of an unfeeling soldier. His gloved hand was clenched into a tight fist at his side, and he shook his head. "None of that means anything to me," he said. "Whoever you think I am, you're wrong. He's dead, and if you stand in my way, I'm going to kill you."

In spite of herself, Diana felt a small, humorless smile twist her lips. "You can try," she said.

Steve pulled the gun from his belt and aimed to kill. The sound of the first shot exploded inside the closed space, and Diana threw up her arms, bracers exposed, sending a succession of bullets ricocheting into all corners of the room, smashing glass and denting concrete where they landed. The gun was still firing when she launched herself into the air, clearing the central podium completely and dropping underneath his raised arm. The dented shield was at his feet; Diana slid her arm through the leather straps and swung hard at the gun.

The bronze made contact with a spray of sparks and Steve’s weapon went flying across the room. On her feet now, Diana swiped at his throat, intending to pin him to the wall, but he dodged and the shield met concrete with a raised puff of dust. Diana whirled, bringing the shield up just in time to block a punch that made the bronze rattle against her shoulder. She struck Steve’s knee out of the way and rammed his arm against the wall.

Steve grunted in pain, but he twisted, grabbing the back of Diana’s neck. Her arm was still caught in the shield’s straps, and he wrenched — sharp and brutal — using enough force to dislocate her shoulder, if Diana hadn’t been quicker. She kicked off the wall and let the movement carry her backwards through the air, disengaging her forearm from the shield in time to the momentum, so she landed easily behind him.

But Steve — this Steve — was quick. He moved in a blur and slammed something against Diana’s side that latched on with a mechanized whine and sent a live current of electricity surging into her system.

The surprise worked to his advantage, and before Diana knew it, she’d smashed through the massive database computer and the concrete underneath like they were made of paper, landing pinned beneath the debris. Broken glass and metal shards dug against her spine and the side of her face while the metal disc continued to crackle, sparking blue with electricity, searing hot and strong enough to keep her momentarily stunned.

Her vision swam, but she could see that Steve was walking towards her, intent on eliminating the only obstacle for his mission. Seconds now. It felt like moving her limbs through solid lead, but Diana reached up and dug her fingers around the disc, feeling the metal burn against the palm of her hand —

Strong enough to kill any human.

But not her.

She yelled, and the steel shell crumpled between her fingers, sparking feebly until all there remained of the weapon was a handful of scrap metal. Diana let the pieces fall and she got to her feet, breathing hard.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” she said.

Electricity crackled and another glowing disc came flying towards her chest, but this time Diana was ready. She arched backwards, missing it by a hairsbreadth, and swiped her leg across to catch Steve’s. It worked, and Diana rammed him into the wall with her shoulder, creating a radius of cracks in the concrete. She caught his forearms and pinned them next to his head, her face close to his. “ _Steve!_ ”

No recognition, none at all. His head cracked into hers and Diana’s grip loosened momentarily — but a moment was all it took.

Steve’s hand locked around her throat and she hit the ground hard enough to make the room shake. A knife flashed from his sleeve, and Diana caught his wrist just in time, halting the serrated blade an inch from her throat, her breath hissing through her teeth from the effort. The knife was trembling from the amount of force the both of them were exerting, and it was almost an accident when their eyes met.

Diana had glimpsed that look before, in the trenches and in Veld, only never as cold as this. Steve had always been practical to a fault, about his orders, about the mission. He’d shot at faceless soldiers without hesitation, rushed into an outnumbered battle in the center of a destroyed village. He’d been a liar, a murderer, and a smuggler. For the mission.

In this life, Steve was still a soldier, and she saw nothing in his eyes now except steely, emotionless resolve. Their strength shouldn’t have been equal, not in any world, but Diana was trying her hardest not to hurt a friend, which meant not fighting at full capacity. Steve was visibly unconstrained by the same limitation — and as far as he was concerned, this was eliminating a complication from his mission.

Diana broke the stalemate by twisting to the left, allowing the blade to bite into concrete. It was a close shave, close enough to leave a sharp cut on her cheek that instantly welled blood. It also gave her enough time to get her knees between them, and she slammed both feet against his chest, sending him flying. But Steve was up in a second, and again the blade slashed through the air — cutting closer and closer each time — with Diana still on the defensive.

Some part of her was still holding back, because she didn't want — she couldn't bear — to be the one to hurt him a second time, not in this life. "Steve, _enough_!" she shouted. "I don't want to fight you."

Steve forced her backwards with a kick, momentarily winding her, and Diana threw up her arms again to block the downward stab of his knife, willing it all to _stop_ —

It was the same as Antiope, the first time Diana had unleashed her powers. What Diana had felt was fear, and above all, defiance, because she was stronger than this, just like her aunt said, and she wanted to fight, to fight _back._ Diana had learned since then that what controlled the blasts was emotion, strong, and overpowering surges of feeling. It wasn't about finding a switch or a trigger, it was about letting go and trusting her powers to do what they were meant to. What Diana felt now was just as strong as the defiance she'd felt in the training with Antiope, the hope when she'd defeated Ares.

It was a combination of emotions this time. Loss, anger…and love. After all this time, still.

_Love._

The same thing happened as soon as the blade in Steve's hand made contact with her arms. It hit with the sound of something smashing, tearing — _breaking_ — and a pulse of pure, sweeping energy blasted outward from the point of impact, shuddering the room like an earthquake, splintering the glass cases into thousands of pieces that rained down on them from above.

The surge picked Steve up and hurled him clear across the room, until he slammed into the far wall — _hard_ — and dropped to the ground, just a few feet away from the relic. He was still struggling to rise when Diana's glowing lasso descended around his shoulders, lashing his arms to his sides.

"I'm sorry," she said, as his dazed stare found hers.

Then she swung a sharp punch into his jaw that knocked him out cold.

* * *

“I thought you said you weren’t going to fight him,” Bruce said, giving the restraints around Steve’s wrists a precautionary tug.

The magnetized, charged cuffs didn’t budge, and Bruce stepped outside of the transparent cell, typing a sequence of numbers into the keypad that made the door sweep shut behind him.

Diana didn’t move, her arms folded in front of her chest. “That _was_ me not fighting,” she answered.

The cell walls were transparent, made of some reinforced and shielded material, constantly electrified, designed to contain creatures and prisoners stronger than him. There was a purplish bruise blooming on Steve’s jaw from the punch Diana threw to knock him out, accrued alongside cuts and scratches from the fight, but even with him bruised and unconscious, she didn’t need to produce the old photograph Bruce had tracked down for her to prove that the resemblance wasn’t just uncanny. It was identical.

“He cut you,” Bruce observed, his tone unreadable. “Are you all right?”

Diana didn’t touch the cut in her cheek, or the tiny scratches on her hands and face from the broken glass, keeping her arms crossed in front of her chest. Bruce must have seen the injuries the second he entered the room, but he’d waited to mention it. Gauging how much Steve Trevor still meant to her, for everything he was now. “It’ll heal,” she said. “Small price to pay to have him back safe.”

“Safe,” Bruce said dubiously. “I’m not so sure about that. The people who sent him after the relic — they’ll come looking for him.”

Diana found a small, dark smile. “Let them try.”

Bruce shook his head, turned back to look inside the cell. The look was appraising, and carried Bruce’s standard amount of wariness for strangers, and then some, the extra amount reserved for someone who had covertly breached their perimeter security and found his way into a secured vault.

“It’s not possible,” he muttered, and Diana wondered if he was talking about Steve being alive, or something else.

Diana still wasn’t sure how, just that it was, and she’d have the bruises to show for it. “Thank you for helping.”

She’d meant the location, an off-site contingency Bruce had apparently foreseen they might need. He glanced now at the dusty ceiling, heavy with cobwebs that stirred gently in the unseen wind passing through the abandoned tunnel, like he didn’t think much of it.

“It’s not like we could keep using a compromised base anyway,” he said. “I’m scrubbing the location now. Clark and the others are going to have a surprise waiting for them when they get back, but I can handle a grumpy alien.”

“How did he find us?” Diana asked. “No one was supposed to know. You handled the security yourself.”

“Add that to the list of questions you need to ask him when he wakes up,” Bruce said. “Though if he’s who I think he is — he’s gotten in and out of places more secure than the old base.”

“What?” Diana said, because they hadn’t discussed it. “How do you know?”

“Because the museum clearly wasn’t his first mission,” Bruce said, pragmatic with mysteries as ever. “So I checked. Ops with hired mercenaries and heavy weaponry, involving a masked agent with enhanced abilities. Came up with a few names, and one stood out. Granted, most people believe it’s smoke — a ghost story — because no active asset could have a kill record going back almost ninety years.”

 _Ninety._ Diana’s vision felt almost painfully focused, even though all she was doing was staring straight ahead, listening to what Bruce was telling her. “What has he done?” she asked.

Bruce didn’t answer immediately, which was his way of hesitating.

“Bruce,” Diana said, meaning it. “What has Steve done?”

“Let’s just say he’s got a record of being involved in some pretty ugly things. Toppled governments in the Middle East, military coups in Southeast Asia, assassinations in Africa…you name it,” he said. “Whatever they did to him — it turned him into another person. Someone who’s probably not going to be your friend, when he wakes up.”

Diana inhaled deeply. “As you say,” she answered. “We will cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“Something else I found interesting,” Bruce remarked. “What they call him, his alias? It’s Ares. Like the god of war. Some coincidence, don't you think?”

If Diana had been clutching something, she would have crushed it into smithereens, because all she could see was fire and smoke and blinding, searing lightning, shuddering from the low roar of the god’s defiant last.

Ares.

Her brother.

Humanity’s worse impulses personified. Cruelty, loss, rage…a culmination of centuries that finally exploded into the worst war beyond anything mankind could have ever imagined.

He was the reason Steve had died.

He was the reason Diana had nearly succumbed to the temptation to become someone else, to choose a destiny for herself that she could never forgive.

 _Answers._ They needed them, and soon.

“Your friend,” she said, in lieu of a response to Bruce’s comment. “Constantine. You reached out to him?”

Bruce made a noise under his breath that suggested it wasn’t so simple. “I did, but he’ll only be useful once he’s sobered up.”

It was so reminiscent of when Steve had found their reinforcements for the mission to No Man’s Land that Diana made a faint noise of exasperation. “Why is it that the men most primed for greatness also happen to be the ones with the worst vices?” she wondered.

“I don’t know,” Bruce said lightly. “Not exactly the spokesperson for ‘normal’, am I?”

“I didn’t mean you, Bruce.”

“Yeah, you did.” Bruce’s expression remained impassive, but the pale light made the fine lines around his eyes and the traces of gray in his hair stand out more than usual. “We should have the results of the blood test in an hour. It won’t give us a match on DNA because we don’t have a comparison sample from 1918, but it’ll tell us if there’s anything unusual in his biology. Until then, we wait.”

Diana nodded, and Bruce slipped away into the shadows, leaving her alone with Steve.

* * *

Steve woke quietly. As he always did, expecting a dark room with a harsh white light shining from above, with months, years, having passed unnoticed in his sleep. But this time he could sense something was different. There was a dull ache in his jaw like he’d been hit with a concrete slab, a sawdust feeling in his throat, and a strange, steady warmth coiled around him like a resting snake.

“Steve?” said a voice.

He raised his head in answer, and it was the woman who looked back at him. Dark hair, dark eyes, bronzed skin and graceful features, as minutely perfect as if they’d been sketched by hand, only more expressive — and fiercely alive — than any drawing could ever be. Her head was tilted slightly to one side as she watched him, and it struck him as a surprisingly transparent action, simultaneously curious and concerned, and he felt his brow furrow at the incongruity of it.

This was a woman who’d literally _flown_ through the air, smashed bullets to dust with her forearms, and hurled him into a wall with some kind of energy shockwave. She was the woman in the dossiers, documented in rumors and guesses as though she were some kind of phenomenon, a whirlwind or a lightning storm, something too dangerous to study up close. Steve had read those files, and he’d made his plans with those numbers and predictions in mind.

But here she was, and up close, she was even more of a mystery than he’d expected.

“I tried to kill you,” he said, and felt a small pulse in the glowing lasso wrapped around his chest.

The other end was clutched in her fist, and she nodded, still studying him from head to toe. “How do you look the same?” she said, as if she was thinking aloud. “It’s like you haven’t aged…at all.”

“Because I’ve spent decades in a freezer until the right people wanted to wake me,” he said easily, too easily. “They tell me I’d have died a long time ago if I didn’t heal faster than normal people.”

The words were barely out of his mouth before Steve took a sharp breath, because he had no idea why he’d just said them, or even spoken at all. All his training, his exposure to interrogation tactics on all ends of the spectrum and the scars they’d left him — it was like none of that had ever happened.

It wasn’t normal.

He of all people would know that.

Steve yanked on the cuffs weighing down on his wrists, like he was bracing for a fight. “What the hell have you done to me?” he said.

Instead of triumph, her face shifted momentarily, an instant of surprise and confusion, identical to when she’d fought him in the wreckage of the burning museum, next to a towering column of flame and smoke. Surprisingly open, in front of someone who’d tried his hardest to kill her, someone she was currently trying to interrogate.

Again, unexpected. And _wrong_ , because he didn’t understand her.

“This is the lasso of Hestia,” she said slowly, watching him like he was supposed to react to the words. “It compels you to reveal the truth.”

Steve huffed derisively. “Sure,” he said, steeling himself to try and fight back, however futile it might be. “Only that’s not possible.”

Diana coiled her fingers around the golden glow. “We’ll see,” she said. “What is your name?”

“Steve Trevor.”

“Why did you come here?”

“To steal an object for my superiors,” he said, because that much was already obvious. “They want it back.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

The lasso pulsed again, only this time the glow intensified, burning into Steve’s eyes just as surely as he felt the warmth build steadily into genuine, painful heat. Like putting his hand against hot metal, only there was no burning or charring to mark his skin. It was all on the inside, in his mind.

Which, in his experience, was always worse.

The woman gave the length a short tug, as though to call his attention back to her. “You cannot lie while the lasso compels you, and it is pointless — _painful_ — to resist. What do your superiors want with the relic? What is it?”

Steve wrestled furiously — and silently — to keep his jaw clenched tight, to stop the words from sliding off his tongue like they so, very _badly_ wanted to do.

The heat was getting unbearable now, and Steve shut his eyes, finding it hard to focus on her. It was the same feeling of having different images layered clumsily over one another like a mirage, overlapping lines and shapes creating a nauseating sense of confusion. He’d been here before, somehow. Or at least, it felt like he had. The answer was somewhere in the emptiness inside of him, but whatever it was, unbroken and unabridged, it was gone now. They’d taken it from his mind and thrown it away like a piece of trash, and left him with nothing but the faint echoes of what it might have been.

Steve was burning, the blood boiling in his veins, a desert where his insides were supposed to be. He’d endured worse, but he could feel his defenses slip, already beyond his control.

Because somehow, somewhere, this had already happened.

He just didn’t know when, or how, or what it had to do with _her_.

“ _Fragment_ ,” he hissed, and coughed, feeling his throat un-seize like a tangible relief. “It’s a fragment. One piece of a whole.”

The woman glanced behind her into the shadows, probably at someone listening and watching, just unseen. “What whole? How many fragments?” she pressed.

Steve tasted blood in his mouth from biting the inside of his cheek. Throbbing now. “Four,” he said, with difficulty. “We have…two. I stole them from a private collector in Markovia, and a university in Corto Maltese.”

“And the last one?” she said. “Who has the last?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he answered. “They never told me where all the fragments were. They’re not stupid.”

“These fragments combined, what do they make?”

It was the question he fought hardest not to answer, but she stayed where she was, not letting go. The heat continued to build, and build, and Steve fought for what seemed like an eternity before he stopped. “A weapon,” he said, through his teeth. “A _spear_.”

* * *

“A weapon,” Steve said, and Diana felt herself slip back in time, to a hundred years ago. “A spear.”

The comm in her ear was live, and she heard Bruce’s voice, coming from a hidden room where he was observing the interrogation. “What?” she said. “Say it again.”

“I asked if you recognize the spear he’s talking about,” Bruce said.

Diana shook her head, aware they could see her from the next room. She was already thinking, her mind racing through possibilities. The spear could have been broken as some kind of punishment, or a mistake, or a failsafe against the pieces ever coming together again. She couldn’t say for sure. If it _was_ Athena’s spear, it was the first she’d heard of the loss. Being hidden in the goddess’s statue was hardly a guarantee of who it belonged to, if the intent was for the relic to remain undiscovered.

“I’m running a search through the database on Greek artifacts,” Bruce said. “I’ll let you know what we find as soon as we have it. Ask Trevor who he works for — at least if we come up short on the spear, we can work from there.”

Diana turned back to find Steve watching her, his forehead beaded with sweat, still breathing hard from the effects of the lasso. “I can’t tell you what they plan to do with the spear,” he said, matter-of-factly. “They never told me. I just kill whoever they tell me to kill, and steal whatever they tell me to steal.”

The blunt truth in the words reminded Diana again that the burning magic of the lasso wasn’t always the thing that hurt the most. “A liar, a murderer, and a smuggler,” she said, mirroring his tone of voice. “Is that it?”

Steve’s eyes narrowed just a little. “I don’t know y—” He broke off without warning, hunching forward as though the lasso was scalding him again.

Diana felt her heart leap. _A lie_. “You know who I am,” she said, taking a step closer. “You know my face. My name. My voice.”

“Diana,” Bruce said over the comms. “I don’t think that’s a good id—”

She reached into her ear and removed the tiny microphone, letting it drop, unnoticed and unseen. “Steve, who am I?” she asked. “Tell me.”

“I don’t know,” he said, doggedly. “I don’t know who you are. My name is Steve Trevor. I wasn’t born in 1893 — and I don’t remember the things you keep talking about, about _us_. I don’t…I don’t…”

Steve’s eyes were closed, and sweat was pouring down his face. Still, he shook his head. “It hurts,” he muttered, his breathing shallow. “My head — it feels like it’s about to split in half —”

Diana went on her knees in front of him, the end of the lasso coiled securely around one wrist as she put both hands on his face. “Hey,” she said gently. “Look at me. You’re all right. Steve, you’re all right.”

Steve kept shaking his head, trying to turn his face away like the sight of her was the source of the headache. “Who are you?” he whispered. “Why do you keep — why do you keep trying to help me?”

His hair was a little shorter now than how he’d kept it during the war, but it had fallen into his eyes anyway. Diana used her fingertips to brush it back from his face, and they lingered on the slight curve of his cheekbone, against the warmth of his skin. “Because someone once told me that it’s not about _deserve_ , it’s about what you believe, and whatever you’ve become, Steve Trevor, I believe that you deserve to be saved.”

Steve seemed calmer now, like something had settled behind his eyes, and he was looking at her with what she supposed was mild incredulity. Which was an improvement over outright hostility. It was colored with interest too, like he wanted to see what she’d do next.

“Then ask me who I work for,” he said, lifting his chin slightly. “And decide if you still believe in saving me.”

Diana highly doubted it, but she’d meant to ask him anyway. “Who do you work for?” she asked.

“Cadmus,” he said. “Funded heavily by LexCorp — which means they get a say, a big one, in how things operate. They’re Luthor’s meta-human control division, to keep people like you and your friends from being problems they can’t take out if they wanted to. I’m one of their covert operatives, trained and ordered to do whatever it takes to further their objectives. Assassinations, sabotage, destabilizing political regimes…I’ve done all of it. You want to know what I am? I’m guessing their genetic engineering department has an answer, and it’s not ‘human’.”

The words were flowing faster now, either because the magic was growing stronger or Steve had stopped resisting.

“My missions were focused on places like Bialya, Kahndaq, Santa Prisca — places where LexCorp needs their interests protected. But the mission took me back here, a simple extraction — right under the nose of the Justice League. _Failed_ extraction, thanks to you.”

The last part bore just a trace of old Steve, a little sardonic, and so unexpected that Diana had to quickly adjust her expression to look more serious. But he’d seen.

“This…Steve Trevor that you remember,” he said, holding her gaze with his familiar one. “He must have been important to you.”

“He was.” Diana nodded. “He is.”

Steve dropped his stare like there was something to be sorry for, turning briefly away, and back again. “Then I hope he’s not me,” he said. “Because I’ve done a lot of things you wouldn’t want your Steve Trevor to be responsible for.”

Diana looked down at her lasso again, even though she already knew. That, like everything Steve had just told her, wasn’t a lie.

It made her insides twist, and she took a step forward, her choice made. Steve’s head jerked up in surprise when she pulled the lasso free from his shoulders, coiling it back at her waist again. She didn’t glance back at the shadows, at the room where Bruce was surely watching.

“You know,” she said, “the Steve Trevor I remember wasn’t a perfect man. He was a _good_ man, but good men are never perfect.”

Steve narrowed his eyes slightly at her, as though he was wondering if he’d heard her wrong. But he didn’t speak. He only watched.

Diana brushed off her hands, wishing she had the watch — his watch — like having it there was a kind of reassuring presence, to help her maneuver unknown and risky territory. “I only knew Steve for a short time, but I knew he was a soldier. And a spy. He killed people in battle — some of them I saw — though I imagine he must have killed many more.”

Silence, still.

“I know you’ve been a Cadmus agent for ninety years,” Diana said. “I only want to know one thing. The people they sent you after — did you want to kill them?”

They looked at each other. There was no lasso, no magic to compel the truth from him, to distinguish real from false, feigned and genuine. It had been a long, long time since Diana had spoken to Steve Trevor, but their truest moments had never involved shielding the ugly realities from view. Disagreements, two diametric opposites clashing — open and unapologetic. Not lies.

It was an answer Diana didn’t want to force from him, not after everything she sensed had already been taken, somewhere deep and private inside of his mind.

It might have been her imagination, but the blue in Steve’s eyes didn’t seem so glacial anymore, as though she was seeing someone close to who he really was.

“No,” he said, with a small shake of his head. “No, I didn’t.”

Diana nodded silently. Because that was what she needed to know.

* * *

“That wasn’t smart,” Bruce said, as soon as Diana entered the room.

He wasn’t alone; she spotted someone in the corner, now turning around with a tray that gleamed silver. Sharply groomed in a waistcoat and tie as always, gray hair neatly parted down the side and his glasses perched on his nose, Alfred Pennyworth was Bruce’s only family left in the world — and had the dry sarcasm to quell any questions regarding the lack of blood relation.

“Ms Prince,” Alfred said, setting the tray down with a gentle rattle. “Some coffee saved for you. Master Wayne nearly didn’t leave you any.”

“Alfred,” Diana said, a little surprised to see him outside of the manor — and the underground cave. “You didn’t have to come all the way here.”

Steaming coffee spilled with laser-precision into a china cup. “I know,” Alfred said, with a sharp look in Bruce’s direction. “I was just at the defunct base, running some self-destruct protocols on the computers as requested. I thought I’d drop by to tell you both that some very large, unmarked lorries were pulling up by the front door just as I was leaving in the car. It seems like you’ve gotten the attention of some dangerous people. _Again_.”

Diana looked at Bruce, who was clearly still annoyed with her, but also intrigued by the information. “They moved quickly,” she said. “Cadmus must want him back.”

“Or LexCorp,” Bruce said, causing Alfred to mutter mutinously under his breath, sugar pot in hand.

“Might you attempt _not_ to put yourself in unnecessary danger, Master Wayne?” he said acerbically, dropping sugar cubes into Diana’s coffee. “At least until there’s a younger generation of Waynes to continue the family name?”

Bruce snorted, and downed his coffee in a few quick gulps. Alfred sighed, in a long-suffering kind of way. “Silly me,” he said. “I forgot there won’t _be_ a next generation.”

“Will they find anything at the base?” Diana said, concerned.

Alfred dropped a flash drive onto Bruce’s china saucer instead of a teaspoon. “Doubtful,” he said. “I may be getting on in years, but it’s not the first base we’ve had to vacate in a hurry. I wager they’ll be running in circles trying to untangle how the lease on the underground property goes back to a rather eccentric survival bunker company based out in Ogden, Utah.”

“Very nice,” Bruce said, and Diana agreed.

“Thank you, Alfred,” she said. “I’m sorry it had to come to this.”

“Hardly your doing, Ms Prince,” he said, acute as ever. “Not if this ‘Cadmus’ is the one to blame, though I confess the name doesn’t ring a bell.”

Bruce shook his head. “Nothing in the database,” he said. “But now that we know they’re being funded by LexCorp, that changes things.”

 _Another enemy_ , Diana translated silently. “Steve said LexCorp uses them to control and suppress meta-humans,” she pointed out. “But I don’t understand how LexCorp could have foreseen meta-humans more than ninety years ago.”

“I don’t think they did.” Bruce was in front of the computers again, and Diana joined him. “I’ve been doing some digging. Before LexCorp got into the picture, Cadmus was just a covert government agency operating at the fringes of the other departments, chasing down leads and starting projects no sane person would believe. Rumor has it they were experimenting on people for the war effort, but everyone higher up turned the other way as long as they got results.”

“It certainly sounds like a project young Mr Luthor would associate himself with,” Alfred commented, reaching over Bruce’s shoulder to type something that brought up the files on Lex Luthor. “Am I to understand that committing him to Arkham Asylum was insufficient to curb LexCorp’s more unsavory tendencies?”

Bruce looked grim, his hands clasped. “We knew it wouldn't be that simple.”

“Like cutting off the head of the Hydra of Lerna,” Diana said, understanding his weariness. “Two more will grow in its place.”

“Indeed,” Alfred said, glancing at the monitor showing Steve in his cell. “Though I must say, hydra heads have gotten much better-looking since the days of Hercules.”

Bruce cleared his throat. “And your conversation with Trevor?” he asked, turning his chair towards Diana. “Not to state the obvious, but taking out your comm-link wasn’t part of the plan. Even if the cells still have listening devices.”

The tone of the observation came close to cutting, most likely because Diana had deviated from an agreed-upon plan, for an interrogation with someone Bruce wasn’t anywhere close to trusting. “I took it out on purpose,” she said, folding her arms. “I didn’t want to talk to him with someone else in my ear.”

“It was an _interrogation_ , Diana,” Bruce said tiredly. “You saw the file, you saw what Ares — _Cadmus’s_ Ares — has done. That’s not someone you trust just because he looks like someone you remember. At this point, all he and Captain Trevor have in common is their face, and that’s it.”

“That,” Diana said, “is exactly why I didn’t want you talking in my ear.”

With Bruce, a minor concession was one of the ways he prefaced a fundamental disagreement. “Trevor was a good guy,” he said, and Diana crossed her arms, waiting. “I’m not disputing that. So remember him. Honor him. But don’t confuse what’s in front of you for something it’s not, otherwise the blood, and everything that happens next — is going to be on your hands.”

Diana shook her head. Bruce may have been speaking from experience, but he’d never known Steve, and he still didn’t. The flickers and glimpses of Steve Trevor in the man she’d faced in the cell, they didn’t mean anything to him, but to her, they meant the world. Because it was hope, no matter how small, that _something_ of the man still remained.

She wasn’t giving up on that hope. Not without one hell of a fight.

Bruce probably knew it.

“Not to interrupt what promises to be a ferocious row,” Alfred interjected, his eye on the surveillance monitors of the surrounding tunnels. “But I believe we have company.”

Bruce rose from his chair, reaching behind his back for a weapon. “Who?”

“Exorcist, Demonologist, and a Master of the Dark Arts,” came the answer, and they all looked around, to the archway at the far end of the room.

A security breach, _again_. Diana started to move, but Bruce held out his arm, like the strange greeting wasn’t as alarming as it seemed. “You could have knocked,” he said.

“That’s rather like the pot calling the kettle black, Master Wayne,” Alfred said, out the corner of his mouth.

“Who are you?” Diana said, narrowing her eyes at the source of the voice.

A cigarette lighter clicked, extinguishing a minuscule red flame, and a man sauntered out into the dim light. Blond and lean as a rake, with strange black eyes that glinted with mischief, he twitched his fingers in a sarcastic salute. “John Constantine,” he drawled. “I understand there’s some magic to be done here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Bahaha. I had to make her throw the shield. I'm sorry, I just had to. I have poor impulse control.  
> \- Again, not as explosive as Steve/Bucky's fights, but eh. I do what I can.  
> \- I love having John Constantine pop up, he's so fun to write. Picture Matt Ryan as Constantine if you want, or whoever. I'm not picky :D  
> Magic and hokey stuff next chapter!


	4. No Man's Land, Reprise

The air shivered strangely at the low-voiced mutterings of Bruce’s friend Constantine, bent over the piece of the bronze spear, the small wax candles set in a circle around the relic dancing and flickering in time to the gestures he made with his hands.

For someone with an aptitude and tendency towards science, Bruce seemed surprisingly willing to let Constantine do as he would, even though Diana highly doubted it was more than smoke and mirrors. Hippolyta had never set much store by sorcery, an attitude shared by her sister and the Senators of Themyscira, who’d collectively opted to train every Amazon to rise or fall by the strength of their own hand, rather than magical trickery — which, even in the old stories, always came at a price.

Either way, Constantine looked more likely to steal something from Diana than help her find out what it was, so she made sure to keep a close eye on him and the fragment of the unknown spear.

“That’s not English, is it?” Alfred said appraisingly, tugging at his ear like Constantine’s voice was a buzzing fly. “I do hope he’s sober.”

Diana shook her head, deciphering the low words with more difficulty than she expected, even with her knowledge of languages. “Some of it’s Ancient Greek, but the rest of it…”

“A bit of Enochian,” Constantine said, without turning his back. “Language of the angels. You never know what we might be dealing with. The Nephilim have spears too, you know.”

“ _Gods_ , not angels. And they can cloak all traces of their powers,” Diana said, feeling the first stirrings of frustration. “We’re wasting time with this…”

“Charlatan?” Constantine volunteered. “I guarantee, love, there’s no one else likely to help you crack these mysteries — not for the fee I’m charging, anyway.”

Bruce rolled his eyes. “You still owe me, John,” he said. “Think about that the next time you choose to bluff at an underground poker game with Bratva thugs, not demons you can send back to hell.”

“Fair point, mate,” Constantine said. “A further two percent discount it is.”

“How generous,” Alfred muttered.

Constantine shrugged, rubbing some kind of powder into his hands that stained the table red. “Hard to feel generous when old Bruce could have mentioned the presence of such a lovely young lady,” he said. “I’d have concluded my business in Gotham sooner and hurried over.”

Diana made a point of showing him she had a sword. “Keep. Working.”

Unfazed, Constantine winked and continued to chant, his red-stained palms turned upward. A fine coat of the colored dust had settled all over the piece of the spear, which made Diana’s preservationist instincts twinge with irritation.

But she also looked closer, because —

“Those are runes,” she said, as spidery cuts began to appear in the previously unmarked bronze, as though they were being etched by some kind of ghostly hand, cast into sharp relief by the blood-red dust. Too elegant to have been made by human craftsmanship. Just like the rest of the spear, flawless. Unnatural.

“Fear…truth…” Diana turned the shaft over and felt her heart sink as she took in the last marks on the smooth bronze.

“What does that say?” Bruce asked.

“War,” Constantine said. “I think we might hazard a guess as to whose spear you’re holding onto, love. So to speak.”

It was Bruce’s turn to look over the spear. “Ares, _again_ ,” he said. “How do we know it’s actually his? Ancient weapons have markings paying tribute to one god or another. It might just be a blessing of some kind.”

Alfred was by the computers, having taken over the position of running through the database. “Not many legends about a broken spear of Ares,” he said. “I imagine a god would have enough power to fix a broken weapon, wouldn't he?”

Diana shook her head, because none of it made sense. From the sound of it, Cadmus was science. Strange science, but science all the same. This was mythology, rituals and magic. “Why would Cadmus want this spear?” she said, turning to the others. “What could it do?”

“It’s an object of celestial power,” Constantine said, brushing off his hands. He nodded at the lasso on Diana’s belt. “Like that. Gods imbue objects with their power, their essence. You might even say it’s like having a piece of their soul around you to help out.”

“Channeling,” Bruce said. “Channeling the power of Ares.”

Constantine shrugged again. “Possibly. Or something a little more naughty.”

“Ares is dead,” Diana said. “I killed him myself.”

Constantine put a cigarette in his mouth and proceeded to light it, slowly releasing a mouthful of pale smoke. “Did you, now?” he said, not sounding surprised in the least.

“Do gods die?” Alfred asked.

“Clark didn’t,” Bruce said, flatly. “Maybe they can’t.”

“No.” Diana shook her head, taking a step back. “ _No._ ”

Because they didn’t understand. They never saw it, the heat of the battle, the surge of the lightning and every blow Diana had exchanged with the god of war himself. She’d killed him. She’d used her father’s lightning and made it her own, blasting Ares to dust.

All the loss, the sacrifice…if Ares was still alive, or _could_ still be alive, what had it all been for?

“Correct me if I’m mistaken in my mythology,” Constantine said, oblivious to her reaction, “but only a god can kill another god, yes? Otherwise, I imagine Hercules might have taken a good swing at Hera for all the trouble she caused him, back in the day.”

Diana nodded warily.

Constantine exhaled smoke again. “Interesting question to ponder, isn’t it?” he said. “Very metaphysical — whether an immortal, _divine_ being like a god of Olympus can ever truly be killed. But you’d have to ask someone with more understanding of Olympus than I do, I’m afraid. As you can see on my business card, my expertise tends to veer towards angels and demons.”

The business card in question went spinning across the table, coming to rest near the dusty relic. As absorbed in her thoughts as Diana was, she could still sense Constantine laying the groundwork for a quick exit, and caught his arm — not hard, but not lightly either — which made him look around, visibly intrigued. “Not so fast,” she said. “There’s one more thing I want you to do for me, John Constantine.”

He raised an eyebrow, like he didn't much care either way. “It’ll cost you.”

* * *

Steve was alone again. The lasso was gone, and the woman too. Just as he’d guessed, telling her the truth — at her request — had produced predictably bad results. For all her talk of saving him, once she'd gotten the real story, she’d taken a step back.

Now she was gone.

The name _Steve Trevor_ meant something to her, but maybe not enough, weighed against everything he’d done. This imposter who wore her friend's face like a ghoulish mask. A cruel twist of the knife. He'd given her enough for the Justice League to fill in the gaps, to color in the blank white space with crimson. The assassinations in Markovia. The embassy in Kahndaq. The hospital in Quarac. More than what was humanly possible, except he wasn't really human anymore, not after what Cadmus had turned him into.

There should have been too many dead faces to remember, but Steve — for all that was incomplete and broken about his memory, his sense of self — remembered all of them. Somewhere inside. Somewhere locked away, but still too easily accessed.

So that became who he was.

A monster.

Steve was exhausted, not from the fight, but the lasso’s magic. His eyes were starting to feel heavy, closing for longer and longer periods of time, until he eventually felt himself slip into a light doze.

_Footsteps._

His instincts, primed to wake at the first sign of trouble, jolted him from his sleep, and Steve looked up to see an unfamiliar man standing in front of him, his hands in the pockets of his trench coat. Ash blond and scruffy, as neat as the wrinkled collar of his white shirt, with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth.

“And who are you supposed to be?” said Steve.

The man started rolling up his sleeves, and reached towards Steve’s face, ignoring how he arched backwards as far as he could to avoid being touched.

“What the hell are you —?”

“Don’t worry, I promised the feisty demigoddess I’d take good care of you,” he said, and Steve felt something cool and dark — soothing as shadow — spread beneath his skin at the touch of the stranger’s hands. “Shouldn’t hurt one bit.”

The last thing he heard before slipping into the soporific darkness was the less-than-reassuring caveat: “In theory.”

* * *

“Are we by any chance missing a basin of pig’s blood?” Alfred inquired, as Constantine closed the last line in the circle with a fine grain of salt. “A witch’s brew, perhaps?”

“All I need is a bundle of sage from you, mate,” Constantine answered, brushing the remaining crystals from his hands and getting to his feet.

The white salt had been shaped into a circle, surrounded by a larger ring of undecipherable symbols, all of it laid to enclose the flat table Steve was lying on, unconscious but breathing. Diana had her hand on his chest, watching it rise and fall in time to his slow breaths.

The thick, cloying scent of herbs drifted lazily from a small heap on a metal plate that had been set alight, filling the air with smoke that swirled to form strange shapes in the air. Bruce was the only one who didn’t seem the least bit taken aback by the scene, standing at the side, observing.

Diana wondered if he’d seen Constantine do this before, and if he had — what the result had been. It was impossible to read Bruce’s expression for good or bad cues, not when everything else — the compounding uncertainty, the unknown elements like Steve — had pushed his walls up higher than ever.

“Will he stay asleep?” he asked, clearly wondering if they needed a sedative to keep Steve from fighting them.

Constantine rolled his eyes, like it was obvious. “Have a little faith. You don’t expect me to keep a highly-trained killer fully awake while I go rummaging through his mind, do you?” he said, stepping past Diana to stand at the head of the table.

She shifted aside, but decidedly not out of the circle. It was unreasonable, her distrust of Constantine’s magic. He’d shown her what he could do, uncloaking a god’s deception with a few swift mutterings of an unknown language. Diana herself used magic on a daily basis — or something like it. The kind imbued in her lasso, the elemental force behind those massive surges of energy, even her armor and bracers.

But those were god powers. Not magic. Not really. And as unknown as the boundaries of her abilities sometimes remained, at least Diana knew where they came from. _Her_ , and in herself she trusted. Not a man who talked of demons and angels like they were the same malevolent creatures in his hardened, cynical eyes. A man who might as well have gotten his powers from the devil himself.

As though he could sense her protectiveness, Constantine put one hand on either side of Steve’s head, careful not to touch him. “Don’t worry, I’m only searching for impressions. If there’s magic in here, godly or human mischief, I should be able to sense it.”

Steve was completely still, his face wiped clean of all expression in sleep. Diana watched him for signs of pain, ready to stop Constantine — by the throat, if necessary — if Steve so much as flinched.

The room seemed to grow quiet, darker. Shades of black deepened while the whites glared, the salt and smoke and the symbols they made standing out sharply against the intensifying shadows. All the while, Constantine spoke under his breath, so quietly and quickly that it sounded like a continuous hum.

“You say he doesn’t remember you?” he said, his eyes closed.

“Yes,” Diana said. “But he knows me — somehow. The lasso compelled him to admit that. It hurts him when he tries to push harder.”

“Mm.” Constantine resumed his low muttering, unbothered by the thick, heavy smoke. “There’s something empty here. Something they tried to take away.”

“Tried?”

“It’s like a false wall, love,” Constantine said, cracking one eye. “You have to know what you’re looking for so you won’t be fooled. Someone wanted his memories buried deep, far out of his reach. It’s advanced magic, very powerful. Only the best sorcerer or sorceress could have done this.”

Diana glanced at Bruce, a silent question as to whether Constantine could be trusted. He nodded, silently, and Diana turned back. “Can you break it?” she asked.

“They don’t call me ‘master of the dark arts’ for nothing,” he said wryly. “Might sting a little though.”

Diana reached down and gripped Steve’s hand without saying a word. If it was possible to lend him her strength, even just a little…

Constantine tensed, inhaling sharply, and Steve jerked as though he’d been shocked with electricity, though his eyes stayed closed. The restraints were holding him down, but the two of them looked like they were in pain, or at the very least fighting something that was unwilling to surrender.

“Steve?” Diana said. “ _Steve!_ ”

He didn’t respond. Constantine was sweating, breathing hard. “It’s strong, this block. Whoever created it took precautions. His mind's trying to burn itself from the inside out because it senses an intruder — I'm doing all I can to hold it at bay — _bugger_!" he cursed abruptly, turning back to Steve.

"What?" Diana said, but Constantine had gone back to chanting, feverishly fast, the words forming an unbroken hum.

All the while Steve twisted, sweat pouring down the sides of his face and neck, writhing like he _was_ being burned from the inside out. Struggling. Steve, and Constantine too. Against magic Diana knew next to nothing about.

Diana looked down at her bracers, gleaming silver against her forearms. She remembered Ares touching her lasso, electricity sparking from his fingertips, and the visions that sprang up in her mind, as real and enticing as anything she could believe. He’d showed her the world — the perfect, untouched world — that might have been without Man, and for a moment, a long, long moment, Diana had almost believed it might be a better one.

The gods had powers. Diana just hadn’t discovered the extent of hers, not yet. “How?” she said urgently. “How can I lend my strength?”

Even while straining against the power of an unseen force, Constantine managed to grin. “Was hoping you’d offer,” he said. “Hands on his chest, and open your mind, _but_ —”

He stopped Diana before she could reach out to Steve.

“Careful, goddess,” Constantine said, a gleam in his eye. “It’ll be dangerous.”

It was a warning as much as a challenge, and Diana’s expression didn’t change. “Good,” she answered, and laid her hands over Steve’s heart.

Instantly, she felt something strange surge into her from the points of contact, a rush of dizziness that left her disoriented. It _was_ strong magic, for even her to feel it — it was a miracle Constantine was even standing at all.

“ _Molles somnos, somno iam_ ,” Constantine intoned, and Diana felt herself descend into pure, liquid darkness.

* * *

Diana had never been inside someone else’s mind before. Constantine’s spell dragged her down into shadow — a living, twisting thing — but just as quickly, it seemed to expel her like a wave of water, and suddenly…there was light.

She stumbled, landing hard on one knee, her palm splayed against the ground to steady herself. There was soil beneath her fingertips, silvered with enough moisture to form black mud. It was beneath her nails, in the creases of her skin. Her movements felt slow in this strange, in-between place, as slow as they were in her dreams, and Diana raised her head.

She hesitated.

“No,” she said, because she’d remembered this place.

It was the battlefield. _The_ battlefield, nearly a hundred years ago, entirely as Diana remembered it. Gray and cold and open to the harshest of the elements, earth scarred deep with trenches that snaked across the ground, two sides pushed apart by a stretch of scorched barrenness. Behind her, she could see the crumbled remains of a farmhouse, marking the entrance to the Allied side of the trenches. Under her boots, the remains of a riverbed. The gnarled and blackened trees growing out of dead soil. Ahead, the twisted curls of spiked wire guarding the enemy entrenchment.

If Diana closed her eyes, she might have heard the shrill wail of a shell hurtling towards her from the clouds. The explosions from enemy rifles. Screams of the dying, the grieving, the mad, and the wounded. Captains shouting orders. Men preparing to die.

But for whatever reason, all she could hear was an eerie silence, as though she was the only person in this haunted wasteland.

Was _this_ Steve’s mind?

Diana forced herself to breathe, the sharp, chilly air stinging her lungs with each inhale. Clearing her head, making it easier to focus. Where was she supposed to go?

“Constantine?” she said, getting to her feet. “What now?”

“Get it to fight back.” Constantine’s voice was nearby, echoing strangely, but unseen. Like he was fighting on an entirely different plane of Steve’s unconsciousness. “It won’t want you there. Get it to fight.”

“ _It_?” Diana turned on the spot, looking for an enemy. But all there seemed to be was barren, scorched earth. No Man’s Land.

_Of course._

The trenches.

It was pure instinct, but Diana somehow realized what she had to do. To get it to fight back, she had to create a reason for it to resist. Resist her. The rusted coils of barbed wire were in the distance, and Diana fixed her eyes straight ahead, and began to walk. Just like she had, a hundred years before.

Her shield was suddenly on her back, her sword at her side, and Diana broke into a run.

Almost instantly, she felt the silence ripple, buzzing like a swarm of furious bees, and she leapt aside just in time to avoid the first attack. Only instead of a bullet, or a shell, what streaked at her was a trail of vivid purple fire, exploding into the black soil just like any projectile would have, leaving nothing but a charred circle of smoking clay in its wake.

 _That_ was a change.

Diana sprang up from her defensive crouch like a sprinter in a race, and she ran. The mud sucked at her feet, but she bent her knees and soared into the sky with a single bound, the wind whistling in her ears as she flew through the air. More purple fire this time, dozens of identical arrows streaking at her from an unseen enemy. Diana deflected the worst of them off her shield and brought herself back down to earth.

She landed with a spray of soil and continued to run. Out the corner of her eye, she saw something bright spark in the distance, heard a roar that preceded the flame, and threw her shield up just in time to protect herself.

This time it crashed full force, and Diana dug her feet into the dirt, her torso bent against the inferno beating against her shield. She’d been here before, pinned down by machine gunfire from the German trenches. Only this time, she didn’t have her friends to help her by causing a distraction.

Beads of sweat rolled down the side of Diana’s face. She could feel her arms starting to tremble, her skin starting to sting from the heat being absorbed by the metal. She was a goddess, but this strange, powerful magic was holding her down.

Laughter. Instead of the deathly silence in the lost battlefield, Diana could hear laughter, echoing through the trees.

_Sorcerer._

Dark magic.

Cruel, and _wrong_. Diana could feel the joy being taken in pain, the laughter at her sadness, her anger, knowing that Steve had been attacked by this malevolent thing. It was turning on her now, piercing at her defenses as she stood, trapped by flame.

_You’re not an Amazon like the rest of us._

_You’re stronger than you believe, Diana. You have greater powers than you know._

Hippolyta and Antiope, together with her now.

And Steve. Close enough to reach, close enough to save, if Diana could fight this. If Diana could win this battle. Just one more.

Diana shut her eyes, against the heat haze swimming in front of her, fanning out across her skin. Instead, she concentrated on the feeling of Steve’s thrumming pulse. Up there, back in the real world, her hands were still on his chest, over his heart. She could feel it beating frantically inside his body, and it was a reminder of why she was here. A reminder of who she was defending — the Steve Trevor she wanted to see again, the Steve she’d have given anything to see alive, after the war.

This was magic she hadn’t seen before, but it wasn’t magic she couldn’t defeat. There was something strange inside her chest, the same feeling that preceded the bolt of lightning she’d used to vanquish Ares, to end his wrath. The same feeling guiding her to use her powers, to discover what they were — to unleash them.

Maybe it was her aunt’s spirit, remaining with her, even past time and death. Pushing her to be who she could be, if she just —

_Set herself free._

Diana let go. She let go, and her shield fell away, exposing herself unguarded to the blinding light. The flame instantly surged ahead to consume her, gleeful now, snaking around and around her like a burning whip. She grimaced, twisting against the pain, because it _was_ pain. The tongues of flame licked at her skin like bared teeth, stinging with each second, unbearably, cruelly hot.

But Diana concentrated on that indescribable feeling inside her chest, and thought the words as they came.

_I am Diana of Themyscira, daughter of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The last child of Olympus, protector of earth —_

Diana opened her eyes. “And you have no place here,” she said to the magic, and pierced the fiery bonds with her arms, bringing them together with a resounding _crash_.

The effect was instantaneous. Energy — pure white and burning like a fire of its own — rippled out from her crossed forearms and clashed with the purple flames, a fierce battle fought in front of Diana, her mind and will clashing against something unseen and powerful, but —

_You will not win._

It was a split second, nothing more, but something sparked, and suddenly the fire was retreating, being blasted backwards. Diana pushed again, and her energy, her power, swept out like a tidal wave to swallow the purple flames whole, smothering them of the air they needed to burn. It continued to push outward, towards the enemy trenches, and collided with a blast of blinding white that sent her flying too.

“ _Steve!_ ” she shouted, and she could have sworn — despite the chaos — that she heard a voice shouting back.

Diana slammed into something hard, and her eyes flew open with a start. She was in the world again, the real world, which meant —

Bruce’s face was in front of hers, and he reached up to feel the side of her head, but just as quickly flinched back, like touching her skin had burned him. Diana looked down at herself; she could see smoke rising off her arms and legs like she’d been singed, like she’d genuinely been caught in the inferno of conjured flame.

“What happened?” she said, pushing herself upright.

He still looked surprised, which meant something genuinely strange must have happened. “You flew back twenty feet,” he said, pointing at the sizable dent in the brick column where Diana had made impact. “Are you all right?”

Diana brushed the concern aside. “I’m fine, but what about —”

They both went silent. Constantine laughing was an alarming sound, and it took her a moment to decipher what it was. He was exhausted and laughing, devilishly, fiendishly pleased about something. “You did it, princess,” he said, his hands still on Steve’s head. “Weakened the magic. Just a little more, and —”

There was a shuddering gasp and Steve lurched. He was awake, his eyes open — darting left and right before fixing on the nearest face, Constantine’s, with complete and utter bewilderment.

Diana took a step forward, numbly, her ears still ringing from the aftereffects of fighting the magic, but Steve didn’t see her.

“Where the hell am I?” he demanded, blinking hard like the light was blinding him. “Where — where is this? Who —”

He fell silent, and Diana realized that they were looking at each other from nearly opposite sides of the room, him on his back and her standing above, like the very first time on the beach.

A lifetime ago.

There was a single, unbroken silence as he stared at her like he couldn’t believe his eyes. Diana held her breath, not saying a word. Flitting in front of her eyes were her memories of Steve Trevor, memories she’d held back for almost a century, now in dizzying, fiercely bright clarity.

She’d fought a battle, she’d won, and now all she needed to know — _wanted_ to know — was if it worked. If she’d brought him back, if he _could_ be brought back, because the alternative was unthinkable.

She’d already lost him once; she couldn’t do it again.

Then —

A smile nearly split his face in two, and he was laughing. Breathless, the blue in his eyes brighter and clearer than ever.

“Diana,” he said, and in that second, it occurred to her that he — the Steve she’d met in this life — had never called her by name.

Now he had, and she heard herself laugh. She was walking towards him, closing the distance to put her hands on his face, his smiling, incredulous face. “Steve,” she answered, because it was him. After all this time, it was finally him. “Welcome back.”

* * *

Death wasn’t supposed to be complicated. Not as complicated as this.

Steve Trevor had seen how easily death came for soldiers, how easy it was to pull a trigger and end a life. To hurl a grenade or drop a bomb, and turn away when the flames erupted into the sky. War simplified things that were never meant to be simple, and confused things that should have been black and white.

Death had come for Steve too, and he’d met it with a smile. Smiling with the knowledge that he was saving lives at the cost of just one, that the war would end and the world would be saved. Because of Diana. Because _she_ could save them. She’d see the Armistice through, and take the world — a flawed, and difficult world — under her wing and make it just a little bit better. A little bit brighter.

They should have had more time, but Steve was still smiling because at the very least, in a world of unceremonious endings and unpredictable chaos, he’d said the words to her. That he’d forced the world to give them a few seconds, at the very least, so he could tell her what he believed, and what he believed was that he loved her. That he’d fallen in love despite a war that made love feel like a distant dream, that he’d fallen in love with her courage, and her kindness, and her heart. Her very human heart, underneath the impossible powers of a god.

 _I love you_.

Dying with a smile on his face was the plan, but Steve should have learned his lesson a long time ago. The best laid plans always and _unfailingly_ went awry.

* * *

Death was complicated.

Steve Trevor was dead.

But he also wasn’t.

Something had been taken away from him and put far, far out of sight. Out of mind. Locked away in a part of his head that he’d been made to forget. Forget Captain Trevor, forget Steve.

 _Steve Trevor_ , they called him. _Agent._ Broken things still needed names, after all. He’d become that broken thing, and they’d turned his jagged edges into a weapon.

One hundred years since 1918, spent in frozen sleep, screams and smoke, and blood.

So much blood.

* * *

Death was complicated.

Suddenly Steve Trevor wasn’t so dead anymore.

And suddenly, things began to come back.

* * *

Salt burned at the back of his throat, the sun in his eyes. A woman with a smile too breathtaking to be real.

“You’re a man.”

She’d said it like a question.

“Do — do I not look like one?”

* * *

The watch ticking against the palm of his hand, almost in time to his racing pulse.

A laugh, a light sound that made his heart skip a beat inside his chest. A dangerous, foolish beat. “You let this little thing tell you what to do?”

* * *

Her hands gripping the front of his coat, careless that she’d stopped them in the middle of a busy London street, careless that she was standing too close — that people who’d known each other for two days didn’t stand _this_ close. Brown eyes as dark as they were earnest. “We made a deal, Steve Trevor, and a deal is a promise. And a promise is unbreakable.”

* * *

“I am Diana, Princess of Themys—”

“Diana, Diana Prince.”

* * *

Tearing after her with the high-pitched whistle of mortar shells echoing in his ears. She was a gleam of bright color in the middle of a gray and barren landscape, standing her ground, alone, against an enemy army with nothing to lose.

“ _Diana!_ ”

* * *

A snowflake landing on the tip of her nose, and her laugh — a beautiful, impossible sound — rushing away from her parted lips in a swirl of silvery mist. “It’s _magical_.”

Steve was holding her hand, her waist, swaying with her in the middle of a village square. She was looking at the snow falling gently all around them, but he was looking at her.

“It is, isn’t it?” he said, quietly.

He didn’t mean the snow.

* * *

A small room soaked in warm firelight.

Hesitating on the doorstep. Not hesitating to touch her, and for her to touch him.

Their faces drawing close together. Breath on each other’s lips.

A kiss that hadn’t felt stolen, because all of it was freely given.

* * *

Another dance, in the middle of a crowded room. Surrounded by enemies.

“I can’t let you do this.”

“What I do is not up to you.”

* * *

“Please. _Please_ come with me.”

Deep, deep sadness on her face, the dawning realization. Humanity had broken her heart, and Steve felt his break along with hers, because it was his fault, his goddamn fault too.

“I have to go.”

She shook her head silently, and he backed away. It might be the last time they’d ever see each other, but he couldn’t stay.

“I have to go,” he’d said, but what he’d really meant was _please, please believe in me_.

* * *

The plane was leaving, engines roaring in the distance. Steve was supposed to be on it, but he couldn’t go — not yet — without seeing her, one more time. Just one more.

Diana couldn’t hear him. She’d been caught in an explosion, and the wind was rising around them, the steel blades on the plane’s wings tearing the words from his mouth as soon as he said them.

So he’d taken her face in his hands and prayed that somehow, _somehow_ , she’d understand.

“I can save today, you can save the world.”

It was their last few seconds together, but she had to hear it. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives, they could be saved if Diana still believed. If she found a reason to believe again. It wasn’t close to enough, but Steve had to try.

Then, selfishly —

“I wish we had more time.”

Because that, along with everything he should have said to her, was the truth.

“I love you!”

It was nowhere close, but it would have to be enough.

* * *

A hundred years.

Steve Trevor wasn’t so dead anymore, and now he was looking at Diana — Diana of Themyscira, Diana Prince, Diana the goddess — remembering all of it.

He’d fought her, fought to kill, without a trace of recognition.

Steve wasn’t laughing anymore, or smiling. It felt like he’d forgotten how. There were restraints around his wrists, holding him down onto the table, and he was suddenly glad for them. Because there was a cut in her cheek he remembered slicing into her skin — a near-miss — and there was blood on his knuckles from throwing punches, now with a monstrous, unnatural strength behind them, that she’d caught with skill and grace.

But Diana undid the restraints with a single tug of her fist and Steve let her pull him back upright. The world swam, because magic and brainwashing and crashing the 20th and 21st centuries together inside his head was, after everything, a little too much.

“Diana,” he began, his voice hoarse. “I…”

As far as apologies went, he didn’t even know where to start. But then Diana was moving closer and before he realized it, he’d opened his arms for her. The hug drove the air out of his lungs, and Steve’s chaotic, unbalanced world steadied itself, just a little.

Like he’d found his balance, and he closed his eyes, burying his face in her warm shoulder. She felt the same to him. A fine equilibrium of softness and strength, warmth and kindness, steel and fire underneath her skin like invisible armor. A meeting a hundred years too late, a meeting neither of them had seen coming.

It didn’t make it any less right, in a world Steve had long gotten used to seeing in all its varying shades of wrong. “Thanks for bringing me back,” he whispered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, he's back! Probably sooner than most of you thought, but I'm aiming to wrap this up in ten chapters or less, so yeah, Steve's "back". Kinda. Not that there aren't twists ahead, wink-wink.  
> Oh, and next chapter starts with a flashback of what happened to Steve after he did the heroic self-sacrifice plane thing that all blond, blue-eyed, World War Steves must apparently do. (*shakes fist at screenwriters*)  
> Thanks for reading!


	5. Carry On

**_Themyscira_ **

**_Sometime in 1918_ **

 

Steve’s hand slammed onto a rock and he gripped it like a dying man’s last straw, his knuckles turning white from the effort it took to drag himself a few inches across the beach, pebbles and sand digging into his stinging skin. He was coughing, a combination of inhaling too much salt water and what felt unmistakably like scorched fuel, boiling metal, and something more painful.

It was how he imagined an actual explosion might taste like, if it had been liquified and forced into his sinuses.

“Son of a bitch,” he rasped, and his shoulders crashed into the sand, his face up to the open blue skies.

 _Wait_.

_Wait just one goddamn second._

If Steve’s remaining strength hadn’t been hanging on by a thread, he might have lurched upright. Because he remembered this. He remembered washing up on a beach, except he’d done it with help.

With Diana’s help.

 _Diana_.

She was going to kill him for doing…exactly what should have killed him, period. Full stop. Captain Steve Trevor, _KIA_. Medals and a neatly folded flag, delivered to his mother’s sun-dappled house in Los Angeles, along with a somber explanation that she couldn’t know the full reason why there was no body to bury, just that he’d served his country bravely and honorably. His father’s watch — Bill’s watch — passed down through generations of Trevor men, known lovingly within the family as the piece of crap that somehow survived round trips to hell and back…now finally, prophetically, blasted to pieces. A tradition that came to an end with her only son.

Steve’s lips were cracked, and they stung when he smiled, feebly, humorlessly. At least he’d saved the watch. Since this was probably some kind of Purgatory, some ring of hell he’d gotten promoted to, after blowing himself up in a plane to save thousands of Londoners from choking on yellow poison.

_Fantastic._

Steve’s vision blurred again, and he was on the verge of passing out when he heard something. Something that definitely qualified as trouble. Horses, and shouting. Sounds from the battlefield, and he was in absolutely no shape or condition to fight.

Before Steve could even attempt to find his footing, a figure appeared at the corner of his vision, and a woman — a beautiful, and very familiar woman — spilled on her knees beside him in the sand. “Where is she?” said Hippolyta, her hand on his chest. Shaking him. Urgently. “Where is Diana?”

Maybe Steve was still a little loopy from the unceremonious landing, but he was finding it hard to see. Hippolyta seemed to be glowing like some kind of blazing sun, from her fair hair, tawny as a lion’s mane and completely unlike her daughter’s, down to the rays glinting off her golden crown and the armor beneath a cloak of white fur. But Diana’s mother hadn’t waited for his answer; she was already scanning the beach for signs of her daughter, her voice echoing across the waves as she called out the same name. Desperation. Love. Hope.

“ _Diana!_ ”

Because she’d left Themyscira with Steve.

Hippolyta clearly thought she’d returned with him, too.

“I’m — I’m sorry,” Steve choked, and Hippolyta’s head jerked back towards him, her mind flitting instantly to the worst possibilities that a mother could imagine. “She — she’s not here.”

Hippolyta went very still, and her eyes — light where Diana's were dark — blazed silently with pain. “Is she alive?” she said, tonelessly.

Steve didn’t know. The last time he’d seen her was on the airfield, flames engulfing the ruined factories in the distance…and a massive, dark shadow in the shape of a man standing impossibly at the heart of the molten metal. The last thing Steve had said to Diana was _I love you_ , and the last thing she’d said to him was his name.

Shouted against the rising wind, because she wanted him to stay.

Steve hadn’t. That was the plan. The unavoidable, no-win-situation plan.

So why was he still here?

“I think so,” Steve said, and Hippolyta’s shoulders lifted, just a little. “She was fighting Ares, last time I checked.”

If Hippolyta’s gaze had been sharp before, it now flashed with all the danger of a bared sword, at the name of a god that shouldn’t — and couldn’t — have existed. At least, that was what Steve had believed.

That was before he’d seen lightning split the sky into a hundred fragments, and thunder rumbling, shaking the earth, all without a single storm cloud in sight. Brilliant, incandescent light as cold as it was terrifying, and the unmistakable roar of something that wasn’t human.

“He found her,” Hippolyta said, and Steve nodded, his throat tight.

“She fought him, she _was_ fighting him,” he continued, against the rising sense of doubt — fear — that had to be attacking them both. “But I’m not — I’m not sure.”

As angry as she was, Hippolyta had to be wondering why Steve wasn’t sure, for someone who ought to have fought at Diana’s side, until the end. But she kept those questions to herself, and studied him instead, with a measuring stare that felt like being plunged into the Atlantic at the height of winter.

Again, fantastic.

Hippolyta didn’t like him in the least, but Steve had a question. _The_ question. “Am I…am I dead?” he asked. “Because I should be.”

He had a feeling Hippolyta wasn’t a big fan of giving out answers, least of all to him. Because instead of responding, she turned, towards a waiting group of Amazons that Steve hadn’t even noticed were there. They were all astride horses, armored, and staring at him. Some faces he recognized from the battle on the beach, and the subsequent interrogation in the strange-looking throne room made of stone and bronze. They might have been the personal guard for the Amazonian queen, shadowing her wherever she went. Half a dozen in all, wearing identical black armor and possessing the identical ability to kill him with both hands tied behind their backs.

The women looked stunned, some crestfallen as though they’d expected their princess too, but Steve was relieved to see that none of them looked like they wanted to string him up over hot coals.

Yet.

It all depended on Diana’s mother.

“He rides with me,” Hippolyta said, with the unmistakable cadence of orders being given. “He will be given every care and comfort at the palace. See to it.”

“Yes, my Queen.”

Steve made a game attempt at standing up, but every muscle and bone felt like it had been turned to jelly, and he managed to roll onto his side before Hippolyta grabbed him by the back of his soaking shirt — as surprisingly strong as her daughter, despite her size — and hauled him towards her white stallion.

The horse thankfully didn’t bolt at the weight of a fully grown man, even if said man was about as capable of standing unsupported as a piece of seaweed. Hippolyta half-threw Steve into the saddle before swinging up herself, mounting in a single, graceful motion. Without another word, she gave the reins a flick, and the convoy of horses scattered sand as they took the length of the pristine beach at a gallop.

* * *

Steve drifted back into consciousness in a bed carved out of a cave wall, in a room lit improbably by something too gentle to be electric light, but too steady to be from candles. The color of honey, warm and soothing. Bronze shapes twisted silently in the air above his head, suspended from the ceiling by wires so thin they were nearly invisible. He had no idea what the symbols meant, but they looked… _friendly_. As if they meant things like healing, dreams, and sleep.

“You sleep like one of the dead,” said Hippolyta, and Steve jumped.

He probably would have jerked the covers up to his chin if they hadn’t already been there, tucked neatly around him, a soft woven thing the color of wheat and a shaggy pelt that felt like sheepskin.

“Sorry, your — uh — Highness,” he said, trying his best to sit up. He just about managed, but only on one elbow, an awkward place between sitting and lying down. “Long day.”

“ _Two_ days,” she corrected.

Hippolyta been standing silently by the window, which in reality was more like a circular patch of open sky in the cave wall, overlooking an expanse of soaring green mountains and the white city beneath. The sky outside was the color of indigo ink, only richer — like something from a painting — and scattered with stars that were more silver than white, and closer than Steve thought any celestial object could actually be.

Diana took after her mother in terms of bearing, carrying herself with the dignity of a queen and all the grace that came with it, but she was also curious. Perpetually curious, and showed it. Hippolyta, on the other hand, seemed to have outgrown something so mundanely human, and she looked more like a sphinx than ever as she let the silence stretch on, unbroken.

Which Steve thought — for some reason — was a cue for him to broach the subject first.

“Thank you for not killing me,” he said. “I don’t know how things work here, but I’m guessing it’s some kind of treason to run off — well, sail off — with the princess.”

Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, he thought to himself: _moron_. Contrary to expectations, Hippolyta didn’t go for the sword at her hip, but stepped towards him again, until she was at the foot of the bed, looking down at him like a carved, and very stern, statue.

“I know the strength of my daughter’s will,” she said evenly. “You brought us news of the terrible war, but she was the one who chose to make it her the reason to leave our shores. Her mission.”

Hippolyta’s rich voice wavered slightly at the last word, and their eyes met with a silent question. _Did she succeed?_

Again, Steve didn’t know. And it was killing him not to.

It must have been killing Hippolyta too, but she didn’t ask again. She glanced out the window, her eyes on the night sky, and Steve saw her take a deep breath. When she turned back, the veneer of the Amazonian queen was back in place, and with it, a fresh resolve. She was about to propose something. Steve just hoped it didn’t involve some kind of prison time.

“As for the question of killing you — I would not dare interfere with what is clearly divine will,” said Hippolyta. “I cannot send back to Hades what has been called from the world of the dead. Not that which has been returned with a purpose, anyway.”

The mention of _Hades_ , the place or the god, made Steve’s head hurt again. Because if at all possible, he’d had enough of Olympus making trouble for one lifetime. Albeit one inexplicably resumed lifetime.

But more importantly, Hippolyta’s answer underscored the fact that she believed Steve had been dead. Actually, _bona fide_ , dead. And that she also believed he was back.

For some reason.

The words weren’t being their most cooperative at the moment, so Steve grasped the best answer he could put together, under the circumstances. “So basically, you think Hades — _hell_  — spat me back out again,” he said, lamely. “What, was I under-qualified, or something?”

Hippolyta raised a slim eyebrow at his chosen terminology, but refrained from comment. “You seem to think you should be dead. Why?”

Steve could have gone on for another two days explaining, but he chose the quick version, in case his strength gave out again. “Because…the last thing I remember before washing up on your beach is being in a pilot’s seat, pointing my gun at a payload of three hundred hydrogen-based gas bombs, and pulling the trigger. Maybe you don’t know what that means in practice, but the long and short of it is: I _should_ be dead. I really, _really_ should be,” he said, and added, to be polite, “Your Majesty.”

“You sacrificed yourself,” Hippolyta said, looking about as surprised as when he’d gone belly-up on the Themysciran shore. Both times.

It was probably a disparaging (and valid) critique of what she thought men were capable of, and Steve, again, had performed to above average expectations.

“I — I guess you could say that,” he agreed, but her surprise didn’t fade.

“Why?” she asked, again.

“It was the right thing to do,” he said. “Thousands of people in London — a really big, really important city — were going to die. The Germans were going to drop poisonous gas on them because they thought — they think — that’s a better alternative than cutting their losses and negotiating for peace.”

“I see,” Hippolyta said, and paused, as though she'd expected more. “A noble reason, but not the only one, I imagine.”

If this was what the Amazon queen could do with the power of intuition alone, Steve was suddenly, _stupidly_ glad that the goddess Hestia hadn’t left Themyscira a spare Lasso of Truth. Because the last thing he wanted Hippolyta to hear was the blurted story about how he’d spent a night — a beautiful, incredible, very _private_ night — with her daughter.

Not that he’d be alive for too long after that, because Hippolyta would probably take that big sword of hers and slice his head off with a single, efficient swing.

“Not the only one,” Steve repeated, thinking. He scrounged up enough strength to pull himself to sit against the rough wall behind his bed, the blankets still tangled around his legs and feet. But a little more presentable, at least.

He’d never had to consider the reasons behind a sacrifice. The thing about sacrificing his life meant — logically — he wouldn’t have to think about the consequences. Being dead, and all.

But here he was, and what he was thinking of, besides his last moments on the bomber as it continued to climb in the sky, was Diana’s face. Diana’s breaking voice, when she’d emerged from the cloud of gas in the eerily silent village of Veld, to tell him that everyone — every man, woman, and child, young or old, sick or healthy — was dead. People they knew, people who’d shared their food and taken them in, people who’d laughed and cheered because their village had been saved, people who’d danced alongside Steve and Diana in the middle of the snowy square, late into the night.

All gone.

Diana had the power to walk through a field of poison and emerge unharmed, invulnerable to sickness and death, but not emotion. The keen, devastating grief that came with loss. Death. Cruelty. All of it, she felt. More acutely and more painfully than the humans who didn’t deserve her.

Steve felt his eyes itch, and he blinked rapidly to clear them. “Your daughter…she — uh — went to fight, in the War. She saved a village of innocent people from an army of Germans, outgunning her a hundred to one. But something happened, and a day later, they were all dead. It wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t stop them in time, but they were all gone.”

Steve was staring hard at his hands, in the creases across his palms like there was blood worked into them. He lifted his head and saw that Hippolyta had gone still again, holding herself that way at the mention of her daughter’s pain. “It broke her heart,” he said simply. “And I didn’t…I couldn't see that happen again, knowing I could have done something to stop it. I guess I thought: one guy versus thousands of innocent lives…it was the kind of math that made sense, you know?”

“But you love her,” Hippolyta said, without preamble, without warning, and Steve stared at her, because _wow_.

“I…” he began. Again, absurdly glad there was no glowing, godly-power-imbued lasso. “I — uh —”

Hippolyta listened silently as he stumbled. For no earthly, sensical reason. It would have been one thing if it was a lie, but Steve Trevor being in love with Diana of Themyscira was about as true as it got.

And he really, really was.

“I do,” he said, finally. “I fell in love with her — I love her.”

He didn’t apologize, and for all Hippolyta hid from view, he had a feeling she wasn’t expecting an apology from the man who’d fallen in love with her daughter.

He was only human, after all.

“And now, Captain Steve Trevor, what is it you plan to do with your return to the world of the living?” she asked, in a very different tone of voice.

Less…distant, somehow. Less like a queen dealing with an outsider. More like an ally.

Steve didn’t even hesitate. “Find her,” he said. “I want to find Diana.”

Hippolyta nodded. “Good,” she said. “Rest. Recover your strength. You will need it if you are to sail from this place and find my daughter.”

* * *

The wooden dock creaked beneath Steve’s boots, and he shifted the strap of his satchel higher up his shoulder. Salt air. Gulls crying as they circled the cliffs. Another boat. Another voyage.

Only this time, he was alone.

“Thank you, Your Highness,” he said. “I know my world hasn’t given you a lot of reason to trust us, but helping me — it really means a lot. So thank you.”

Hippolyta didn’t answer at first, her eyes fixed on the calm sea — a result of the strange, unbelievable magic that kept the island hidden and safe, its own little universe inside a barrier of mist. Untouched and pristine as the inside of a snow globe.

It was a beautiful sight, but Hippolyta sighed, a sound that hinted at an eternity of weariness, the result of watching century upon century of the same mistakes. “Before she left Themyscira, I told Diana that the world of men did not deserve her,” she said. “Did they, Captain Trevor?”

The words struck a chord. Steve knew them because they were the words Diana had repeated to him after killing Ludendorff, after seeing the stark, merciless reality of what lay behind war. The darkness in the hearts of the men who fought each other, needlessly and without reason, to the death.

Even thinking about what he’d seen, a fraction of it, made Steve want to close his eyes and wish they weren’t. That they could be better.

But the truth was the truth, and Hippolyta had asked for it.

“No,” Steve answered, honestly. “But maybe it shouldn’t have to. Maybe…saving the world — really, truly saving it — can’t be about who deserves it and who doesn’t. Otherwise it’s not really saving, it’s just picking and choosing. Taking sides. War — again.”

“Saving the world?” Hippolyta said. “My Diana?”

“I believe she can,” Steve said. “I believe she will.”

“You’re still mortal, Steve Trevor,” she reminded him. “That’s something you may never get to see.”

 _Mortal._ After seeing Diana smash her way through a church and take down an enemy trench with a sword and shield, Steve felt it, more than ever. “Believe me, I know,” he said. “But Diana’s destiny — what she’s meant to do — doesn’t change because of me. I’m going back because I love her, and I want whatever time as we have. Together. If she’ll have me, I mean.”

Hippolyta shook her head, her curls streaming past her shoulders in the sea breeze. “I understand how Man thinks,” she said. “But you, Steve Trevor, are incomprehensible.”

She wasn’t saying that he was above average, but Steve took it as a compliment all the same. As close to one as he’d be getting from Diana’s mother, anyway. He climbed down into the boat, which bobbed gently in time to the waves, and he was reaching for the mooring lines when a thought occurred to him. “If you don’t mind me asking, your Highness — what were you doing on the beach?” he asked. “There was no plane this time. There’s no way you could have seen me unless you were already there.”

Hippolyta smiled, the first smile he’d seen from her, but it was heavy with sadness, the weight of time and the world showing in the lines of her beautiful face. “You mortals have a custom of visiting graves, do you not?” she said. “Places where the ones you love are laid to rest.”

Steve nodded.

“In the span of one day, I lost my sister, and my daughter. My closest, most trusted friend, and my greatest love. I may visit Antiope at her final resting place, but for Diana — all I have is the place where she left me forever, for the world of man and the mission she was born to complete,” Hippolyta said. “And there I watch the horizon, hoping beyond reason that one day, she might return.”

Steve didn’t have the words, and he doubted there were any. Except a promise he could make, a promise that would be unbreakable — to him, anyway.

“I can give her a message,” he said. “When I see her — Diana.”

 _When_ , not _if_.

Surprise flickered across Hippolyta’s face, as though the offer of a favor was more than she’d expected. After a moment of very human hesitation, she looked him in the eye again, decided. “Send her my love,” she said. “And tell her…tell her that she will always have a place here. Themyscira is her home, and I am her mother. That will never change.”

She paused, and what came next was soft, very nearly a secret. “Tell her that I wish to see her, at least one more time.”

Steve nodded. “I promise.”

Hippolyta’s smile bore a little less sorrow than before, maybe a little warmth too, and Steve returned it, putting as much reassurance as he could into the gesture, as little as it might have meant to her. The ropes slid away from the sides of the boat, and the wind pushed against the sails, bearing the him out to sea. Turning back, Steve raised his hand to Hippolyta, who remained alone on the wooden dock, a shrinking figure against the towering mountains of Themyscira.

Diana had stood on the boat once and watched her world disappear from view, not knowing if she’d ever return. The only place she might ever truly belong, with the only people who might ever understand her — the real her — and she’d left it behind. A sacrifice for a mission greater and more important than any of them.

Steve had no idea if that mission would ever be completed, or if it already had, but if that was what Diana wanted, he’d make sure she found her way home. Even if it took him the rest of his life to find the mysterious lost island, he’d make sure of it.

Promises were unbreakable to Amazons, after all.

Steve knew he was reaching the threshold of the magical protection when the vibrant colors and sounds of Themyscira began to dim, like fog melting away under the rising sun. Steve was still looking back when he saw Hippolyta’s arm wave in farewell, as though in acceptance of his promise, and he watched until the mist swallowed the island from view, and he was a lone boat in the middle of an open sea.

It was a silent, starry night, midnight blue stretching on, and on, as far as the eye could see. The breeze tugged at his hair, and Steve moved towards the prow of the vessel, his eyes on the horizon. Maybe it was a risky thought, but Steve let himself imagine, _dream_ , what it’d be like to see Diana again. The shock, the joy, and everything that came after. The time he’d wished so badly they could have.

It was an unexpected, completely unexplainable blessing.

But he’d use it to find Diana, and then everything — time, love, and the beautiful, heart-stopping unknown of it all — could finally begin.

* * *

“…it was 1918 when I reached London,” Steve said, his voice rough from talking, explaining the unexplainable, of how he was sitting in front of Diana again. In a different time, a different place.

“I remember getting to the city, but I never made it back to HQ. I never made it to where I was supposed to be.”

Constantine was still smoking with supreme and complete unconcern for the circumstances, and Alfred’s disapproving looks. Bruce was still watching, still observing, not one to voice his opinion in front of the subject of his silent deductions.

Diana’s hand balled silently into a fist. Steve might not have realized the significance, but she remembered. He would have gotten to London around the time of the Armistice. The day Diana, Etta, Charlie, Sameer and Chief had all gathered to mourn Steve — just as much as they celebrated him — a silent, somber group in the midst of the celebrations.

They were all gone now, all gone except Diana.

Steve had never seen his friends and family alive again, and she knew why.

“They took you,” she said.

Steve nodded. “I don’t know how or why, but Cadmus must have grabbed me, and the next time I remember being awake — it was 1921, my brain was wiped, and they were sending me to Ethiopia to assassinate a warlord.”

Diana glanced at Constantine, because Steve’s memory should have been restored in full. Clearly that hadn’t been the case, and she wanted to know why.

Sensing her stare, Constantine shrugged. “Human memory’s a funny thing, princess. I did what I could to reverse the magic, but it sounds like they did more than just that to turn the Captain into a cold-blooded killing machine.”

Diana said something in Greek that she _knew_ he’d understand, and it made him hold up his hands in semi-serious surrender. But it was too late to take back what Constantine had said, and Steve grimaced again like he’d been stabbed with something sharp, hiding it poorly by ducking his head.

“Uh,” he said. “That reminds me. Thank you. All of you. For not…killing me, I guess.”

Bruce folded his arms. “You had a guardian angel,” he said, and Diana tilted her head, gauging whether it was a pointed stab at her.

It wasn’t.

Constantine blew a small cloud of smoke into the air. “I have another question for the strapping Captain Trevor. Elephant in the room, really.”

“You want to know who hexed me,” Steve said, intuitive as ever.

“Incorrect terminology,” Constantine said, puffing smoke. “But yes. Call it professional curiosity. I like to know whose work I mucked about with — helps with keeping count of grudges.”

Diana laid her hand against Steve’s back, between his shoulder blades. “What do you remember?” she asked, more gently.

Steve winced again, as though he was remembering something. “I don't know,” he said, honestly. “I have a feeling the people doing this to me weren’t what they seemed.”

“Appearances can be easily confounded with sorcery, yes,” Constantine said. “We’re dealing with a skilled shapeshifter, as well as an ability to do some nasty spell-work. Maybe a few rituals for immortality, given the hundred-or-so years. Illusions too, I’ll wager.”

“In case the electric shocks didn’t do the trick?” Steve said darkly, and Diana frowned.

“Shocks?” she said.

Constantine was looking at Bruce. “There’s a sorcerer at Cadmus. Either doing their dirty work, or lying low to keep an eye on this one.”

“But why?” Bruce responded, like Steve wasn’t even in the room. “Why risk it?”

It was an open question, but Steve scrubbed a hand across his face. “I could try reporting back to Cadmus find out, but I have a feeling they’ll either shoot me on sight or throw me into the freezer for another decade.”

Diana’s hand was on his back, and again it tensed at the mention of what he’d experienced. Steve must have felt it, because he glanced back at Diana, but only briefly. Neither of them smiled, because the glance was acknowledgment, concern noted and set aside in favor of more urgent matters to speak of.

The spear.

A fragment of an unnatural weapon, engraved with the runes and blessing of Ares, a vanquished god.

The mystery that was worth life and death to Cadmus.

“It’s not safe here,” Steve said. “The spear — Cadmus _will_ find it. If they can’t send me, they’ll send others. You all need to get as far away from that thing as possible.”

Steve looked around the circle, at the expressions ranging from guarded curiosity to blank ambivalence, as though he was expecting her friends to be afraid. Diana couldn’t speak for Constantine, but she knew Bruce and Alfred, and fear — or the lack of it — was a trait in which they surpassed belief.

“If it’s as important to Cadmus as you say, then we have a responsibility to safeguard the relic,” Diana said. “Anything to stop it from falling into the wrong hands. This is _Ares’s_ spear, after all.”

Bruce gave her a sharp look, like she’d just let slip vital information to an outsider, but Diana ignored him. Steve covered his face at the word _Ares_ , releasing a tired sigh like they’d been there before. “Ares’s spear,” he muttered. “I’m guessing that means you’re not going to let this one go, are you?”

“Correct,” she said. “I will not abandon my duty when it matters most.”

“There’s no place safer for the spear,” Bruce added, unfazed by the warning. “Not that we know what _it_ does, since you can’t tell us.”

“ _Bruce_ ,” Diana said.

Steve inclined his head. “I know you have no reason to trust me, but I broke into your vault once. I guarantee you someone else will.”

“Sound advice, given the recent turn of events,” Alfred muttered. “I suggest we take it under advisement, sir.”

Bruce watched Steve with an expression as inscrutable as a closed book. “Fine. It’s taken.”

Diana decided it was time to intervene. Steve had to be exhausted, and there were things they needed to say to each other, alone. “We can discuss this tomorrow,” she said. “He needs to rest.”

“Here,” Brice said, like he’d sensed what Diana was thinking.

But she only smiled.

* * *

Steve was all kinds of tired. His brain had been pulled in a dozen different directions, upside down and inside out, wrung out and piled clumsily back into place, and all he wanted was to close his eyes, to be given a moment without a threat of things changing all over again — even if they had to. But a part of him was afraid he might never wake up, and there was still everything he had to say to Diana, and everything he wanted to.

At the same time, it was starting to feel like a bad idea. By that, Steve meant being alone with Diana, in the 21st century, in her apartment. Resuming, after an indefinite stop in the form of a hundred years. Maybe a little too late.

Another reason presented itself almost as soon as Steve stepped inside. Before the door was even halfway closed, he'd already swept a quick glance around the space, scoping out the room as though he was assessing it as a safehouse, a temporary stop until he had to move on. He was in borrowed clothes, his gear discarded so he wouldn’t draw attention, but he was still hardwired, conditioned in ways he couldn’t even explain, except that it was to be the opposite of normal. To be…usable. A tool, a weapon. Something that didn’t have feelings or thoughts of its own, except the ones they — this shadowy, enigmatic _They_ — wanted it to have.

“Are you sure I shouldn’t be underground?” Steve asked, standing beside the front door. Diana let it swing shut behind her, flicking the deadbolt like it was an absentminded habit instead of something she genuinely needed for security.

Well, of course.

She put her keys on an old-looking table by the side of the door, pausing to glance at the letters there ( _strange_ , so incredibly _strange_ ). “It’s easier for Bruce to talk behind your back if you’re not there,” she said. “Besides, if you fall asleep near Constantine, he might pick up where he left off.”

The curl of her lips meant that she was teasing him (and he was relieved that she could), but Steve shifted uncomfortably at the reference to his head, as out of sync and downright messed up as it was, and looked elsewhere.

Big, beautiful windows. Mirrors and paintings on the white and gray walls. Neat and clean lines all around, but nothing aggressively sleek or modern. The furniture wasn’t brand new, just well preserved and carefully chosen. Splashes of bright color — rich red or dark blue —to break the monochrome of snowy gray and white. Simple, elegant, and comfortable. Someone _lived_ here.

Diana lived here.

Steve had learned to read rooms the same way he read people, gleaning important information with a flick of his eyes. Age, occupation, interests. It was a hard habit to break, and Steve already had a guess in mind before he could stop himself.

Galleries. Museums. A job to do with art and history.

“I’m an antiquities dealer,” Diana said, as though she’d sensed his train of thought. “In case you were wondering.”

“Antiquities dealer.” Steve wondered if his voice was more like sandpaper than usual, or if he was just imagining it. “Suits you.”

He meant it. For someone who’d lived centuries on an idyllic, mystical island beyond the reach of time, Diana had adjusted. She’d found her place in a world built by someone else, and made it her own.

Him, by comparison, less so. Assassin by force, spy and soldier by training. A man out of time, but also — paradoxically — _not_.

It was ironic, really. She’d asked him once, a lifetime ago, what people did when there were no wars to fight, and Steve had made a guess. Albeit with the caveat that he genuinely had no clue what the real thing might look like.

Here they were now, positions reversed. A hundred years later.

Steve’s head gave another stab of pain, and he shifted slightly, trying not to look at any of the lights. Diana saw, probably because she’d been watching him closely — as closely as he watched her — and dimmed the glare with a switch in the wall, reducing the glow to something closer to candlelight.

“Sit,” she said, gesturing at the pale sofa in the living room. “Please.”

Steve reached out to steady himself against the back of the couch, but he didn’t sit. It felt too much like an intrusion, into the finely balanced serenity of Diana’s present day. He was the one out of place, and she didn’t need him upsetting an equilibrium. More than he already had, anyway.

Diana didn’t remark on his reluctance, crossing over to the windows instead. She drew the floor-length curtains closed, across the balcony doors and the tall, white-framed windows — shutting out the view of the river and the distant lights of the cross-harbor bridge.

Then she turned back to face him. “You’re welcome in my home, Steve,” she said. “There’s no need to be…”

_Afraid. Uncomfortable. Confused. Frustrated._

All of the above.

Diana pressed her lips together instead of finishing her sentence, and drew herself up a little straighter, as if she was about to suggest something. “I know people usually eat when they are unsettled,” she said. “I have food. It’s supposed to be terrible for you — I understand those are usually the most comforting.”

Steve would have laughed — or made a game attempt to — if he didn’t think there wasn’t a real threat of accidentally splitting his head open. So he pretended there was an itch above his eyebrow and put his hand behind his back, quietly grasping one of the pillars for support. “Some aspirin would be great,” he said casually. “If you have it.”

Diana crossed over to the kitchen, separated from the living room by a countertop, and pulled open some cupboards. She’d found what she was looking for, but she hesitated for a second, the bottle of aspirin clutched in her fist.

Steve caught the look she tossed over her shoulder, a cross between bemusement and something else — something brighter, and more innocent. She was _happy_ to see him. Happy he was there. Happy that she was opening her kitchen cupboard to get him some painkillers for a headache.

“I’m sorry,” she said, leaving the bottle on the marble countertop while she filled a glass of water for him. “It’s just…I’m not sure what to think. You’re from 1918, but you’re also from right now, and I don’t have to explain any of — _this_ —” she gestured around her, at the quietly humming fridge and the sleek appliances, evidence of the 21st century “— it’s all just…very strange.”

Biggest understatement of all time. Steve drained half of the tall glass in two gulps, and he downed two aspirin with the rest. A little better now. The water helped with the sawdust feeling under his tongue, and once the aspirin kicked in — maybe he could try his hand at being normal.

Then again, _normal_ didn’t seem like an option for either of them. For varying but pretty self-evident reasons. “I think we can agree that ‘strange’ doesn’t even _begin_ to cover you and me,” he said quietly, resting his shoulder against the kitchen door. “Are you sure about this, Diana?”

Diana tilted her head to one side. “Inviting you into my home?” she inquired. “It was my understanding that a man and woman can be alone in a room together these days. Unless there’s another presumption I’m missing?”

“Not that,” Steve said, though there probably _was_ a presumption. That it was safe. Or a good idea. “I meant…I _mean_ — it’s one thing to defend me in front of your friends, but I’m…I’m different. I’m not Steve Trevor anymore. Whatever Cadmus did to me — I — I can't put things back and pretend it didn't happen. We can't pretend it didn't happen. I'm not the same person I was when we met, and I don’t think I’ll ever be. So what I’m trying to say is — you don’t have to — you don’t owe me anything.”

Steve inhaled deeply. “You don’t owe me anything, Diana,” he repeated, for his sake as much as hers.

Because it was a hundred years later, and of all the presumptions Steve hated to make, this was one of them. As much as it hurt to think that she’d moved on, it was a comfort, in a way. Knowing that she had a life, a happy one, a contented one, in a world that didn’t have the best track record with delivering good things.

Diana listened, her expression remaining impassive while he spoke. That was a change from what he remembered, when her face had shifted with everything he said, no emotion hidden, nothing held out and away from view. Curiosity, jubilation, anger — all of it. Now Diana could listen as though she had been carved from marble, more remote than before, with more of herself secreted away. He’d watched her, back in the underground base. She smiled less too, solemn and composed where she’d used to show every thought as soon as it came into her head, unwary of scrutiny.

It made him a little sad too, to think Diana had lost that innocence. That his world had forced her to grow up.

Steve looked her in the eye, and Diana softened, as if she knew what he’d been thinking. “We’ve both changed, Steve Trevor,” she said. “In ways we never wanted. Ways beyond our control.”

He nearly pulled back when she started towards him, but Diana moved gracefully, a step at a time, measured and careful. Steve felt his breath catch in his throat when she lifted one hand, again carefully, making sure he knew exactly what she meant to do.

She laid it against his chest, near his heart, and held it there while his pulse drummed on, underneath bone and muscle. Measuring the beats of his heart, like it was something familiar to her.

Steve remembered her doing the same thing, only with her palm laid against his bare skin. Back then. Back in Veld. Man had still been strange to her, odd creatures unlike anything she’d seen on Themyscira, and Diana was curious about them — more accurately him, the closest available specimen — asking questions about his childhood and the life he’d had, before the war. Before her.

He remembered a lot of things about that night, and he wanted to think that they could go back to that, or something close to it — something hopeful — but Steve didn’t know.

He just didn’t know.

“What you did for Cadmus wasn’t of your own will,” Diana said firmly. “It defies reason to carry the blame on your shoulders, when people like Lex Luthor and Cadmus deserve all of it.”

She just sounded so _sure_ , in a sea of uncertainty, that Steve wanted to believe it. Believe her. Something that hadn’t changed, not between them.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Guns kill people. You blame the shooter, but at some point, you have to hate the gun too. I’m that gun, Diana. They treated me like a thing. A weapon. I'm here a hundred years later because they didn't care about wrenching me out of one time and throwing me into another. They didn’t care as long as I killed who they wanted me to kill, and I did.”

Steve shrugged his shoulders, and the movement shifted Diana’s hand, her fingertips momentarily leaving his chest. “I’m Ares. Their Ares. I’m not saying I was perfect before they got their hands on me — because I really, _really_ wasn’t — but I was a hell of a lot better then than I am now. I wasn’t scrap metal. I wasn’t…broken.”

Diana reached up and smoothed the palm of her hand against his cheek. No warning this time, but Steve didn’t need one. Not for this. It was infinitely tender, this touch, and Steve realized with a pang how much he’d missed having her skin against his.

“I understand what it means to be a weapon,” she told him. “Because I was born to be one. Zeus’s daughter, left with the Queen of the Amazons, to be used when the time was right. _I_ was the God-Killer. Not a child, with a destiny free for her hands to shape. My mother never told me of my fate, and I used to wonder why — because I _did_ become a god-killer. I destroyed Ares, as I was born to do.”

Steve leaned into her touch, and felt Diana’s fingers extend — gently — at the weight, the silent reassurance that he was listening.

“I never knew my destiny until after I had set out to do battle with Ares. By the time I learned the truth, my path had already been decided. _I_ decided it. I never fulfilled my destiny because I had been schooled from birth to believe it was my one true purpose. I killed a hateful, cruel god because he would have ended the world in his quest for vengeance, for a better one built on the ashes of the dead. _I_ made a choice, and I chose to fight because it was the right thing to do, not because I was born to do it.”

In spite of himself, Steve felt the smallest of smiles break through, because Diana had destroyed — defeated, vaporized — an actual, living god. The god of _war_ , someone who personified the brutality and chaos of battlefields, soldiers and probably — possibly — every weapon known to man. If war was the human sacrifice that sustained him, Ares had been living off millennia of pure, destructive energy, from conflicts, rage, _strife_ , since the beginning of time.

And Diana had taken him on.

And she’d beaten him.

There were no words to describe how proud he was of her — how in awe — so Steve smiled, a quiet moment where maybe, just maybe, he felt a little more like the Steve Trevor in 1918, constantly and continuously discovering the depths of strength Diana could hold, against all odds.

“I don’t think my destiny holds up compared to ‘saving the world’,” he said, and Diana gave him a familiar look, a look that warned him she knew she was being teased. “But what you’re saying is…there’s a choice.”

Diana nodded, and he felt her thumb trace the contours of his smile, fading now, but still faintly there. “A lesson I’ve learned from watching your kind is that you can always choose what you will become. You, and no one else. _That_ is your power. Good and evil lie in all of our hearts, but it always comes down to a choice, and you, Steve Trevor, will _always_ choose to be a good man.”

Steve breathed out, because he didn’t know what promise he could make in response to that. Having a demigoddess tell him that she had unwavering faith in him was a little hard to top. But the beauty about Diana was that she understood, and he shut his eyes, letting his head dip forward.

Giving himself over to her, her faith and her kindness. Her trust.

Maybe something more.

Diana had never said it back, after all. The three words. The last three words he’d said to her, hoping she’d hear him.

A part of Steve wanted to ask. A part of him was afraid of the answer.

Another part of him — the one with an uncanny sense for shaky ground and dark thoughts — didn’t want a repeating pattern. Whether saying _I love you_ would turn out to be their last words to each other, Steve didn’t want to find out.

So they stayed exactly as they were, an exquisite moment of stillness, warmth, and trust.

“Stay,” Diana whispered in his ear, and Steve nodded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't even know why, guys. There's just something funny about having Steve interact with Hippolyta and the Amazons.


	6. Devils On Your Shoulder (Strangers In Your Head)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brace yourselves, guys. Here be the feels.

There was a storm brewing. Diana could hear the tense rumblings in the sky, rolling and ominous. No rain, not yet, but it would come. She used to watch the storms from her window, back when the revelation that she was Zeus’s daughter still presented itself as a novelty. When she’d still wondered if maybe there would finally be a sign, a sign that she wasn’t alone, a sign that her father was somewhere, in another world, another universe, watching.

Nothing.

Eventually, she’d stopped wondering. A question, one of many, that would go unanswered into eternity.

Another rumble sounded overhead, and Diana emerged from her room to check on her houseguest again. Her apartment had rooms to spare, one of them a study, the other a perfectly adequate guest room. But Steve had collapsed on the sofa, and she’d let him be — while also wondering, silently, if it was polite to lift him on her shoulder and transfer him to a real bed.

But she didn't. From the sound of it, Steve had done his fair share of waking up and blacking out, most of them without will or volition. Diana wouldn’t add to another one of those bad memories; she refused to.

Steve was still stretched out on her sofa, the blanket she’d draped over him now on the floor. Diana stooped to return it, gently laying it over his legs and torso — actively resisting the urge to brush the hair from his forehead.

It was just so easy to be tender with Steve.

Diana knelt on the floor by the sofa for a few seconds more, before she got up and moved to check on the curtains. They were white gauze, glowing in the daylight and softly luminescent in the nighttime. Tonight was no exception, tinted amber and rippling slightly at her touch.

Some of the glow fell naturally on the wall closest to the windows, and Diana’s gaze passed slowly, silently, over the many framed photographs sitting on the pale shelves, a fraction of a lifetime’s worth of collected memories.

The original of the photo they’d taken in Veld was tucked away in a safe, too fragile to stand exposed to sunlight on her wall of shelves, and too prone to raising questions if she left it within easy view — even if she never brought visitors to her apartment. But it _did_ have a place among the other pictures, a silent memory surrounded by others, a story — stories — she held close to her heart.

“Hey,” Steve whispered.

Diana turned at his voice. As an afterthought, she pulled the dark red robe around herself, even though his standards couldn’t possibly have been offended by loose pants and a simple shirt.

“I’m sorry,” she said immediately. “Did I wake you?”

Steve shook his head. He’d left his jacket — on long term loan from Bruce — over one of the chairs, and he sat up in a wrinkled t-shirt, his hair sticking up oddly from lying down. “I guess I’m not used to closing my eyes without horse tranquilizers knocking me out,” he said, rubbing at his eyes. “Two hours of normal sleep isn’t bad though, all things considered.”

He had a tendency to pass off the reprehensible memories as something easy to dismiss, wry to a fault and self-deprecating. Something of his old self, at least. Diana frowned at it, but Steve brushed it off.

“I saw your mother on the island,” he said, as though he’d been expecting her to ask. “She was kind to me.”

Diana smiled a little, even though it went hand in hand with an aching pang inside her chest. “She was always kind.”

“She asked me to tell you something,” Steve said, and Diana went still. “She asked me to tell you that there would always be a place for you on Themyscira…and that she wants to see you. At least once.”

Diana could sense the hesitation in Steve’s voice, wondering if she’d already returned to Themyscira. But her silence betrayed her answer, the silence of a guilty, absentee daughter, and he could see.

“You’ve never thought about going back?” he said. “You could. Finding Themyscira would be easier than it was a hundred years ago, especially if you already know what you’re looking for.”

All of this had occurred to Diana, but she hadn’t tried. For a reason. A reason she’d only admit to Steve. “I left Themyscira on a mission to end war, and bring peace to mankind,” she said, staring at a patch of reflected light on the far wall as she thought of Hippolyta’s face. Lovely even in sadness, a sight burned into her memory. “I cannot face my mother and tell her I failed.”

Steve ducked his head briefly, and Diana wondered if he was remembering the voyage from Themyscira, when she’d announced in no uncertain terms — to him, a stranger — that she intended to stop the worst war the world had ever seen. A war she knew almost nothing about. A war more complex and corrupted than she’d thought possible, at the time.

The Diana who’d said those words to him was long, long gone.

So was the daughter who could bear to face her mother, with righteous purpose and fierce defiance. Saving mankind from itself. The lone Amazon who was willing to go, to fulfill the wishes of the gods — wishes that only existed in the stories she’d heard as a child.

“They told me about you,” Steve said, his eyes still fixed on the ground. “Before they sent me after the spear. I didn’t know it was _you_ , but they told me about what you did. The Justice League, Darkseid, Doomsday…”

Steve finally looked up, and their eyes locked. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think anyone could say you failed. Least of all your mom. Who still thinks you’re the sun and stars and the whole goddamned galaxy, I’m guessing.”

Diana smiled at him but didn’t answer, and he let it go. The choice was hers, and for all that was different and changed about them both, Steve still knew that it was a decision too momentous, too significant, to be made in the spur of the moment. In the silence, his eyes wandered the room, until they alighted on the photographs at her back.

“I was going to ask about those,” he said, searching the shelves as though he was wondering after the photo. _The_ photo.

But Steve didn’t ask. He’d probably guessed the reason behind the omission, in his unspoken, intuitive way. He was studying the photographs, the creases at the corners of his eyes deepening whenever he recognized a face — and there were plenty he’d recognize.

“They look happy,” he said finally.

It was a bittersweet thing, to see happiness preserved, to see the faces of his friends but know that they were gone, the lives they’d lived now kept only in faded colors and spoken stories. Diana faced the wall, and she sensed Steve getting up to join her. Survivors, both of them. The ones left behind.

It hadn’t taken Diana very long at all to realize that it wasn’t always a mercy.

“Would you…” Steve began, and hesitated, the words catching in his throat. Diana let him find them on his own, because he had to. “Would you tell me about them? Please.”

Diana never told those stories, and she’d never been asked to. But this — and only this — was the exception, because they wouldn’t just be stories to Steve. They were the missing pieces of his life, the life he should have experienced firsthand — even if it was a life that meant Diana would be standing on her own right now, in 2018, surrounded by silence and ghosts that couldn’t speak back.

The old ache in her chest resurfaced as she took in the photographs, black and white with a few splashes of color, following the times, wondering where to begin.

In lieu of an answer, Diana reached out and picked up one of the frames. Silver, with a twisting border of red and gold. Subtle richness — for a reason. It was a photo of flashing lights and captured noise, her and Sameer, standing against a stage after one of his performances, with a sea of army uniforms in the background. He was in a ridiculously theatrical costume, complete with a stick and a hat, and twenty-two years after 1918, he looked older — while she had stayed the same. It should have made Diana sad, but it was hard to frown when she saw how they were standing arm in arm and beaming, especially since she remembered the night in question. Paris, a rickety hall where the stage had nearly caught fire and the roof leaked rain from a storm. But Sammy hadn’t even blinked; start to finish, doing what he loved best. Taking his bows in front of a cheering crowd of French and British troops dejected by a harsh, unforgiving war.

Diana chuckled. “Sammy got his wish — he became an actor,” she said, and Steve gave a small laugh of surprise, taking half the frame in his broad hand to see it better.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “How?”

“He performed plays for the soldiers during the war. The second war,” Diana added reflexively, with a small twinge of loss. “He shared the stage once with Laurence Olivier in Normandy — I think because one of the understudies got food poisoning.”

“Or Sammy talked him out of it,” Steve murmured, shaking his head in affectionate exasperation. “He always could talk the spots off a cow.”

The description made Diana laugh too, remembering Sameer at his best. “I held his first grandchild,” she sighed, showing him another picture, this time at a hospital. “A girl. He ended up calling her Diana, but if anyone asked, her namesake was the maiden goddess of the hunt, not the woman who’d fought beside him in the trenches. That was our secret.”

Steve was quiet again, his smile soft and sad. “Of course it was.”

Diana took another photo from the shelf. Charlie at Christmas — grayer, and more weary-looking — but forgetting all that to grin lopsidedly from a battered-looking piano, surrounded by his family at Christmas. Diana had always been welcomed into the boisterous Scottish clan, always invited to their house overlooking the green fields and winding creek. The tinkling notes from the old family piano drifting out into the night, laughter and tall, tall tales being told near a fireplace. She had been a part of that. As long as she could. As long as she could bear it. “Charlie found peace after the war. He married a nurse — Margaret, we called her Maggie — and they had two boys, Steven and Billy.”

Steve’s shoulders stiffened a little at the implication, at the surprise, and the sudden little stab of pain, and Diana squeezed his arm. “He named his son after you, Steve,” she said, because she wanted him to hear it.

Instead of answering, Steve pointed out the obvious, looking at the age of the freckled boys on either side of their father, making faces for the camera. Eleven and twelve then, too young for a war that hadn’t started yet, a war they hadn’t foreseen. “They would’ve been the right age for the draft,” he said. “Did they…did they make it?”

Diana nodded. She remembered the feeling of sinking despair, watching as negotiation after negotiation crumpled, peace treaties and accords trampled by the onslaught of cruel men who wanted more. Barely twenty years on from a war that had devastated a generation of youth and altered the landscape of power forever, and there were armies ready for it to begin all over again.

She hadn’t left her island this time, because there _was_ no island to leave. She’d chosen to stay and fight, but this time she did it without her armor, without colors. She didn’t want it to be her story, and she didn’t want anyone to know — no one except Sammy, Charlie, Chief and Etta. People who knew why, and understood, and wanted her to be all right.

The exception came in the winter of 1942, when Charlie took her hands in his and begged — begged — for her to find out where his boys were. Close in age and assigned to the same platoon in the British army, they’d gone missing behind enemy lines, and Diana couldn’t watch Charlie’s world shatter into nightmares and haunted ghosts, knowing she could have stopped it.

So she went.

“They’d been captured by the enemy in 1942,” Diana recounted. “Poland, dead of winter, most of their company taken prisoner by the Germans. Charlie told me, and I went. No armor this time — but I brought them home.”

She sensed Steve’s relief as a tangible thing, the same as her. Charlie’s boys, safe and sound. Steve had never known them, but they were already family to him. Diana had, and there was no question of leaving them behind, of letting fate do what it would. She’d already failed to bring Steve — _her_ Steve — home once before. She wouldn’t fail Charlie, and his son.

“That can’t have been easy,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She knew he was apologizing in the general, all-encompassing sense, for failures and mistakes he couldn’t control, and Diana loved him a little more because of it. She let Steve stare at the photo of Charlie for a little longer before she continued her story.

This time, Diana didn’t need prompting. She chose a photo of her and Chief, standing against the backdrop of the red Arizona desert, their faces sunburned and shaded by their hats, but smiling. “Chief always wanted to travel, so I went with him,” she said. “After the war ended, he showed me America — the plains of Arizona, the Nevada desert — we rode horses and I had my first American ice cream cone.”

Steve laughed again, turning his head towards hers. Their noses caught each other, carelessly, ridiculously, and Diana almost did it then. Leaned forward to press her lips to his, a reclaimed moment, a gesture in place of the words she hadn’t said. But their time had already been claimed by their friends, their stories wanting to be told, so she gently let the moment pass.

The picture of her and Etta was one of her favorites. They were in her well-tended (if very messy) garden, sitting in the fading light with the children playing behind them in the background, the sparklers in their hands turned to white blurs by the lens. It was the Fourth of July, some fifteen years after the war, and even though they were in the back garden of a red brick house in Hampstead, London, the longstanding tradition was boxes and boxes of sparklers and all the red, white and blue decorations they could find. A party, a reason to gather and eat, laugh and swap stories, and later, when the sky darkened, tap glasses and remember a fallen friend who should have been there with them.

Etta said it started with Steve’s first year in London, away from home. She’d thought he was an odd one — even for an American — disappearing for weeks at a time, doing things too dangerous for polite conversation. Which was all fair and normal for someone in British Intelligence, but when he returned — and he somehow always did — he’d trawl the city during his rare days off for hotdogs and hamburgers instead of girls in pretty dresses and dance clubs. According to Etta, American food had been a little more difficult to manage, given her proven ability to burn anything near a stove, so Fourth of July it was. She’d tracked down every kind of streamer and sparklers in red, white and blue, alongside her many connections with similarly uprooted Yankees in London, throwing a garden party that left Steve nearly in tears from laughter by the end of it, sitting on the grass with Etta, completely oblivious that some of his hair had been singed by a rogue sparkler.

_Miss Candy,_ he’d said to her, sticking out his sooty hand like a salute.

_And we were friends ever since,_ Etta used to say to Diana, patting her hand contentedly as she rocked back and forth in her chair. _Throw a homesick American pilot an Independence Day party, and he’ll be your best friend for life._

Moths would be fluttering gently around the lanterns, children laughing a stone’s throw away, and every now and then, the distant sound of a passing car. Charlie on the piano, after making a fuss about how Etta needed to tune the keys more often. Sammy — and Chief, as his unwilling supporting player — making the children gasp and clap with impromptu performances. Peaceful. Quiet. What they’d fought for, and more.

But also less.

Thinking of Etta — happy, kind, infallible Etta — still made Diana want to cry, and she rubbed away a tear on the side of her cheek before continuing. “Etta stayed the closest,” she said. “After the Armistice, she helped me find a job in London — in one of the culture offices — helping families track down their possessions. Heirlooms, sculptures, paintings…she thought I might like the work.”

“Sounds like good old Etta,” Steve said. “She always knew when my shoes were untied before I did. You guys saw each other a lot?”

“Practically every day,” Diana said, with a smile. “Her husband and children were lovely.”

“And she threw Fourth of July parties every year?”

“She called it that,” she said thoughtfully, “but it was an excuse for everyone to eat and accidentally set something on fire.”

“Good old Etta,” Steve said with a grin, and Diana watched it fade, slowly, knowing what he was about to ask her.

“How did it happen?”

“A stroke,” Diana said. “It happened in her sleep. The doctors say it would have been peaceful. Painless. She was ninety-two.”

Steve carefully returned the photograph to its place, but his eyes were wet. Diana’s throat felt tight. She’d gotten the chance to say goodbye, in her own way, but Steve hadn’t. Worse still, he could have. If his memories hadn’t been stolen from him, if Diana had known sooner, and helped, _if, if if_ —

“My mom. My dad. My cousins. Friends. All of them,” he said thickly. “All this time — I couldn’t remember.”

Diana reached up and took his face in her hands again, and Steve let her. She felt his tears on her fingertips, and she wished there was something she could do to give him the goodbyes he deserved.

Something else she couldn’t change.

“None of them forgot you,” she said. “They never forgot the brave, brave man who sacrificed himself so they could live. They never forgot their friend.”

Steve cleared his throat, struggling to speak. “Maybe it’s a good thing,” he said quietly. “That they never got to see me like this.”

“Steve —”

Lightning flashed white behind the curtains and a slap of rain dashed loudly against the windows, sudden and startling. Steve jerked back as a clap of thunder made the glass in the room rattle, and it had been a long, long time since Diana froze because of the sound, her memories dragging her back to when it had meant a bomb, and death, and screams, and blood.

But this time she looked around too, because the thunder, booming out into the night…it sounded just like the plane that had lit up the sky. The plane Steve had flown into the clouds and —

Diana’s throat felt as dry as sand.

“It’s all right,” she said to him. “Just a storm.”

The look Steve gave her was of someone realizing the broken pieces in front of him and not knowing how they could be fixed. “Sorry,” he said, and all of it was pushed down again, tamped out of sight. “Thank you for telling me. I needed to hear it.”

“Steve,” Diana said, as he turned away, pretending he was going back to sleep. She sank onto the sofa, her hand on his knee. “I’m here. You can trust me.”

Steve pulled away again, like he was afraid he’d burn her. “I trust you, Diana,” he said. “But I don’t trust myself.”

* * *

_I don’t trust myself_.

There. Steve had finally said it out loud, and the words seemed to hover in the air, pushing outward, pushing them further away from each other.

Diana didn’t move. There was a storm raging outside, lightning and rain, but she didn’t move, remaining in exquisite stillness. “Why?” she asked.

Steve looked at her, because there was no realm of possibility where Diana didn’t know the answer. Steve had a bruise on his jaw, and she still had scratches on her skin — fading now, but only because she healed fast — from their fight. Vicious, dangerous, destructive fight. Steve had been brainwashed, given orders, and he’d fought her, fought to kill. It was only because of Diana that he was back to some semblance of himself, and even then — Steve wasn’t sure how long it could stay that way.

They were in her _home_.

It was her life, and it was intimate information, something Steve shouldn’t have been allowed to see. Because it was so unlike the Diana he’d met in 1918, unlike anything the princess from Themyscira would have chosen. Everything on the island was balance and nature and a time of its own, but the Diana who’d invited him into her home — the Diana who’d _lived_ , after the war — she was the guarded, statuesque woman who kept her thoughts a sealed mystery in the present. Her smile either belonging to a sphinx or a warrior finding dark amusement in a challenge.

Different. Grown up. Hardened, in some way. Like the natural chinks in her armor had been forged all over again in ash and flame, and now the glowing edges had solidified into stronger steel, places — vulnerabilities — where she’d never be hurt again.

The only time he’d seen the cracks show were when it came to him, and he wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. Not when it felt like he couldn’t trust the inside of his own head. He didn’t want to be the weapon that might end up hurting Diana. Of all the things he’d survived, beyond rhyme or reason, he knew for sure that he wouldn’t survive that.

He couldn’t bring himself to show Diana what another shattered example of humanity looked like. Steven Rockwell Trevor. His brain turned to scrambled eggs and put back into place with voodoo and witchcraft, now with the added benefit of freakish super-strength and the skills for creative killing.

“You know why,” Steve said, harsher than he’d meant to sound. “I shouldn’t be here. You don’t — you don’t need me. I’ll just complicate things, and people are going to come after me, and they'll try to hurt you —”

“ _Try_ ,” she said, emphasizing the word.

“It’s Cadmus,” he said, just as stubbornly. “If they managed to make a monster like me, what else do you think they have in their lab?”

“Then we’ll fight it when it comes,” she answered. “Steve, you’re _back_. You’re safe. Whatever it is, we’ll fight it, together.”

Steve didn’t say anything.

_Good, evil, it’s always a choice, and you, Steve Trevor, will always choose to be a good man._

_Maybe it’s not about what you deserve — maybe it’s about what you believe._

When push came to shove, Steve Trevor was still having trouble believing. One hell of a role reversal, after Diana’s crisis of faith, back in the worst war they’d thought mankind would ever see.

Steve stood, taking a step back. “I have to go,” he said, and saw Diana’s resolve fracture, just a little.

Because she was remembering when he’d said those exact words to her, nearly a century ago. She hadn’t stopped him then, but Steve didn’t know if it would be the same this time.

Then Diana got to her feet silently. “If that’s what you want,” she said, in an unreadable voice. “But there’s something you should have first.”

She turned on her heel and disappeared down the corridor, into one of the rooms. In the meantime, Steve retrieved the coat he’d borrowed, pushing his arms through the sleeves, forcing himself to think about where he could go. The farther, the better. The planning should have come easily. Vanishing without a trace was his specialty, and Steve _needed_ to vanish this time. Until he figured things out, until everything began to make sense again.

But he didn’t want to. Selfishly, stupidly, he didn’t want to. Losing his memories of Diana hadn’t stopped him looking for her, longing for her, after someone his other self — the Cadmus agent — hadn’t even recognized. A hundred years, and maybe another hundred after that.

Steve could have opened the front door and slipped away, but something made him wait, standing in the middle of Diana’s apartment, waiting for her to come back with whatever she wanted to give him as a parting gift.

Diana emerged from her bedroom after a minute or so, something clutched in her hand and a blazing, defiant look in her eye that made him avert his gaze. Whatever she had was small enough to hide with her palm, and Steve’s thoughts were so jumbled, so confused, that he didn’t realize what it was until she’d walked right up to him, and opened her hand.

He looked very quickly at her face, turned up to his, because —

“It’s my watch,” he said, taken aback.

Maybe because the watch was old, old enough that he’d lost track of exactly how long it had existed. Passed to him by his father, who’d gotten it from his father before that…

Maybe because it had seen enough trouble, enough war, and enough hell to make him think that it had to — _had_ to — have fallen apart. Crumbled to dust. A piece of junk.

Maybe because he’d given it to Diana, no, _entrusted_ it to her with every expectation of dying, and in his heart of hearts, it genuinely never occurred to him that she’d give it back. Because it was hers. This piece of himself, something he’d taken with him all over the world, through missions that went off without a hitch and the missions that went awry, through exploding earth, icy water and scorching flames. A watch that still ticked, in spite of it all.

Steve Trevor had expected to die, but even at the end, he couldn’t bring himself to leave without giving Diana something to remember him by. An apology, almost. A wish for more time, because leaving a watch with an immortal goddess — how could that be anything but a shot in the dark?

Steve — in the present day — realized that he hadn’t moved in what seemed like a long time. Though in all fairness, neither had Diana. He reached up, tentatively, and smoothed his thumb across the watch face. Everything about it…the marks on the leather strap, the small scratch on the side…exactly the same. It might have left Steve’s wrist just seconds before, only...frozen at 9:05.

_9:05…_

Steve wasn’t sure, but it could have been. His watch, forever frozen at the time he’d died, a hundred years ago. As frozen in time as he was now. Unintentionally, carelessly fateful.

It was hard to look at, and Steve gently closed her fingers around the watch, pressing her hand between both of his. “It was a gift,” he said, hoarsely. “It’s yours.”

Diana shook her head gently. “It belongs with its owner,” she said, her voice as quiet to match his. “You told me once that the watch had been through hell and back with your father, and with you. You’re leaving me now, Steve Trevor, and I want you to promise me that you’ll keep it safe.”

_Leaving_.

Steve still had Diana’s hand between his own, and neither of them were quite looking at each other, their heads dipped, facing the watch. He couldn’t speak when she was this close, much less make the promise she’d just asked of him. The words were slipping away from him, overwhelmed, by her — just her.

Now, right now, Steve was reminded how much he’d always loved Diana’s hands. Her voice, husky and rich, like red wine. Her laugh, rarer now, but it had the unfailing ability to make his heart skip a beat, to bring a smile with it, no matter how serious his thoughts.

_God,_ Steve still loved her.

Something was different from before. They’d touched in front of the others, but now that they were alone, it was different. They were different. Steve took half a step closer, and Diana might have done the same. Their hands still entwined, protecting the watch between them. Two frantic pulse beats replacing the stilled heart of the clockwork mechanisms that used to tell time.

Their foreheads touched, and they weren’t looking at each other, but at the narrowing space between their bodies.

Breathless.

“You were my greatest love, Steve Trevor,” Diana said softly. “And for a hundred years, you were my greatest sorrow.”

Steve looked up, startled. A part of him had doubted whether Diana ever heard his last words, and she’d never mentioned it since. It hadn’t mattered whether she’d said it back. What mattered was that he’d been brave enough to say them, weighing against all the sins and the unforgivable compromises he’d made in his lifetime of being human, flawed and deeply imperfect. What mattered was the fact that his last words had been to a woman he loved, a woman he didn’t deserve — not in any world — and those words, _I love you_ , had been the plain, unvarnished truth. Given with no expectation of an answer, of anything in return.

But now she had. Returned the words, when Steve was more flawed, more imperfect, more undeserving than ever.

Diana lifted her head, slow as a dream. She kept her hair pulled back from her face these days, except now, falling around her shoulders, still as dark as he remembered. Her gaze was direct, uncompromising, and bared.

_All this time_ —

Steve gently freed his hand from cupping the watch, and his heart was in his throat when he reached up and touched the back to her cheek, turning it slowly so that his thumb traced the outline of her cheekbone. A gesture as familiar as it was new, so startlingly, impossibly new.

“I don’t deserve you,” he whispered.

Diana mirrored the gesture, her fingertips scraping gently against his rougher skin. Always kind, always gentle. “It’s not about what you deserve,” she whispered back. “It’s about what you believe, and I love you, Steve Trevor.”

To hell with a repeating pattern. It was dangerous to tempt fate, but Steve couldn’t find it in him to care, not right now. Not after a hundred years of silence and missed chances and pain, too much of it, and longing. Too much longing.

Another low rumble of thunder. Rain pattering against the windows.

Steve had a choice to make, whether he trusted himself when it came to how he felt about Diana, how he felt about them, and whether it was stronger than everything that might come, and would come. For him, and for her.

Steve had a choice to make, and he chose to be brave.

“I love you,” Steve said, because it was still the singular, powerful truth. He loved Diana, and at least once, even if it was just this once, they deserved to hear each other say it. “I love you.”

They were swaying a little on the spot, swaying like they were dancing in an open village square, snow drifting silently around them — in a town and time that were long, long gone — except now there was a thunderstorm just outside the windows and it was a hundred, impossible years later. Swaying, because they were both unbalanced, vulnerable, and open because of each other. _To_ each other.

Steve felt Diana’s hand at the back of his neck and he leaned in, letting her guide him, and their mouths met with a real shiver — a tangible _thrill_ — of something that felt unquestionably like rightness.

Like after all this time, they’d finally found their way back to each other.

Diana had asked Steve to stay, and just minutes before, he’d been prepared to go. She was still clutching him close when she started to move backwards, towards the corridor, towards the bedroom.

This time, she didn’t ask. But she meant _stay with me_.

Steve followed her, because he meant _yes_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little bit shorter this time, but eh, it feels deserved.

**Author's Note:**

> \- It started a little slow because I wanted to give a general picture of what Diana's life is like in the present day (plus a little Bruce/Diana banter, which is always fun)  
> \- "Grand theft museum statue" isn't exactly as thrilling as Bucky's escapades, but eh.  
> \- I know Bucky doesn't remember who he is at the initial confrontation with Steve, I'm taking artistic liberties :)  
> I'm on Tumblr (Chronicolicity) if anyone wants to come cry about the ending of the movie and stuff.


End file.
